Tools for Thought

One of the most controversial principles of Getting Things Done is what David Allen refers to as “hard landscape.” Hard landscape is the practice of restricting your calendar to externally committed tasks: meetings, appointments, events — anything with a time or date dependency.

The converse of this practice is the controversial part: don’t put anything else on your calendar. The idea is to avoid using a calendar as a filtered To Do list. In this scheme, the first priority is to review your calendar to make sure that any items that do have a genuine time dependency take precedence. Next Action lists are reviewed and worked off in the windows between scheduled items.

There are some exceptions. If a task is expected to take about an hour or longer, it’s useful to block the time on the calendar to avoid interruptions. Because of the extended time factor, these tasks can be treated as events. If an item is not an actual commitment, but has a time or date dependency, like a theater event you’re still undecided about attending, entering it on the calendar will allow you to see it on your Weekly Review and make a final decision on it; this is essentially using your calendar as a tickler file.

Hard landscape and time management

Not scheduling or prioritizing next actions runs contrary to generally accepted principles of time management. Having an uncrowded calendar seems to imply a lack of commitment.

In GTD, the calendar is used for information, not motivation. If a task doesn’t actually have to be done today, entering the task on today’s date sends the brain mixed signals. It sees that the task “needs” to be done today, but knows that there’s no actual date dependency beyond arbitrary scheduling. Mixing real date dependencies with fake ones erodes the hard edges between categories, and erodes the calendar’s trustworthiness.

If the mind has to re-sort the day’s calendar to determine which tasks on it genuinely have to be done (to avoid consequences), the purpose of processing on the front end is defeated. When the processing of inputs is done properly, there should be no need to mentally rebuild list and calendar entries during the review phase, unless a new input has suddenly shown up (like the boss asking, “Do you have a minute?”).

What about Parkinson’s Law?

According to the oft-cited Parkinson’s Law, work expands to fill the time allotted to it. If someone is given eight hours to do a five-hour task, it will take eight hours. The corollary usually drawn from this is that shortened deadlines lead to optimized execution. Therefore people will put self-imposed deadlines on their calendars for things that have to real time boundary, in an effort to motivate themselves to work faster.

Just how effective Parkinson’s Law is in practice depends on a number of factors.

Notice that when people cite personal examples of Parkinson’s Law in action, they’re almost always in the context of real emergencies. This is the equivalent of lifting a heavy vehicle to rescue a child trapped underneath it. Both cases draw on reserves available in special circumstances, but are not sustainable. Constantly burning the midnight oil to meet the next morning’s deadline eventually leads to impaired performance, just like running a car at top speed.

Parkinson’s Law is usually ineffective with wage earners, for reasons that should be obvious. If someone is getting paid by the hour, there’s not much reason to expect that worker to optimize while forgoing self-interest.

With teams, Parkinson’s Law is demonstrably ineffective. There are simply too many unknowns and mutual dependencies to ensure that everyone on a team can maintain an accelerated schedule. Since one team member’s output is often another member’s input, all it takes is one person to fall behind for whatever reason, and the entire team is affected.

Parkinson’s Law is more effective the less it’s used

Parkinson’s Law is not sustainable. When someone continuously works with abbreviated deadlines, especially ones that are self-imposed, the anxiety created by manufactured urgency leads to errors and burnout that will typically require more time to compensate for them. Even when people do execute projects on accelerated deadlines, Parkinson’s Law dictates that they will simply fill the gained time with more work.

The use Parkinson Law effectively, it needs to be used occasionally, not continuously. It’s possible to get most of the benefits of Parkinson’s Law just by mentally modeling the course of action you would take if time were restricted: How would I complete this project if I only had one-third of the time?

The only problem with proceeding in this fashion is underlying assumption that things need to be done fast. Before trying to figure out how to do something faster, ask yourself if it actually needs to be done faster. You might just need a clearer next action.

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