Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

As we get into 2025, everyone's talking about goals, productivity, and being their "best self."

But there's a hidden force working against you nobody's talking about: Parkinson's Law.

Here's what you need to know👇🏼

📒 DEEP DIVE

Stop Giving Yourself Too Much Time: The Hidden Law That's Killing Your Productivity

The universal law of wasted time

What if I told you the biggest threat to your engineering projects isn't technical complexity?

It's something far more basic: the simple act of giving your team too much time.

This isn't just a theory—it's a proven law of productivity that's dictated project timelines since the 1950s.

It's called Parkinson's Law, and it's probably affecting you and your team as you're reading this.

What is Parkinson's Law?

The basic idea is simple: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Give yourself a week for a task? It'll take a week.

Give yourself a day? You'll get it done in a day.

30 minutes? You... get the idea.

With Parkinson’s Law, even if you start immediately and work diligently, you'll unconsciously expand the scope, add unnecessary features, or over-polish until you fill the allotted time. It's human nature.

Think of it like a diamond: You start with something rough, and you polish it to create something valuable. But keep polishing past that point?

You'll actually destroy value, turning your diamond into worthless dust.

There's an optimal amount of time for every task—a sweet spot where you've done enough to deliver value, but haven't started destroying it by over-engineering or over-polishing. 

Finding that point is the real challenge.

From Theory to Application: Real-World Scenario

Years ago, I was regularly giving presentations on the speaking circuit. When I had months to prepare, I'd spend endless hours polishing slides—tweaking colors, adjusting formats, and second-guessing every word choice.

Then came my wake-up call: I got a last-minute call to deliver a presentation with just 12 hours notice. 

I got up at 3 AM, coffee in hand, and stripped everything down to its essence. Black and white slides (literally). Pure content—zero fluff.

That presentation? Ranked in the top 3 at the event.

This was Parkinson's Law showing me exactly where that diamond-polishing sweet spot was.

The Manager's Guide to Parkinson's Law

So how do you find that sweet spot at work?

For leaders (especially in an engineering organization), the pain point hits with project-based work. You're trying to get a time estimate from someone and it's almost always too high.

But leaders also need to understand something: People have been burned. 

They’ll say the biggest number they can think of that will either:

a) Get them not to do it or...

b) Give them plenty of breathing room.

So what do you do when your team says a project will take them 6 months? Here's the process:

1. Let them know you believe them—this is always the first step.

2. Ask them, “What do you have to cut to get it to 3 months?”

3. Listen carefully to what they'd cut (like features nobody actually needs)

4. Create intentional constraints that force focus on the core value.

5. Repeat this until every part of the task is valuable and can’t be skipped.

The 2025 Challenge

As you push forward on your personal goals for 2025, remember this: The more time you give yourself, the more time you'll take.

Want to be your best self this year? Start by giving yourself less time to do it, and challenge your teams to do the same. But do it strategically:

• Identify your most important goals

• Cut your initial time estimates in half

• Focus only on what delivers real value

Everything else is a distraction to look busy. The beauty of Parkinson's Law is that once you understand it, you can use it to your advantage. 

🎙 EPISODE OF THE WEEK

Want to know why most businesses stay broke? They're doing their finances backward.

This week on the Build Your Business Podcast, Matt and I break down exactly how to fix that.

We're talking bootstrapping, getting lean, and implementing Profit First in ways that actually work.

If you're tired of hoping there's enough left over to pay yourself, take a listen here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

There's an old saying that perfect is the enemy of good. But it's more than that—the pursuit of perfection is often just Parkinson's Law in disguise.

This year, try something different.

You might be surprised at what you can accomplish when you stop giving yourself so much time to do it.

Talk soon,

Chris.