Human beings live, move and have to pass away - free from worries, but unknown and unnoticed. They live such an irreproachable life - reputable, but so incomprehensible and inscrutable. Chalmers was very right!
Why do people live like that even knowing they have to leave the platform of life one day? Why are people sometimes afraid to live and allow something or someone to block themselves? Still in my mind is one statement of Brother Francis Castro from the Little Brothers of Jesus. I quoted it several times already: "I feel the burning flame
inside me that makes me jump out of the bed ... and hurry to work!"
Life's quintessence can be also this: Kindness, by helping the blind man crossing a street; hospitality, by practicing generous reception of strangers and guests (my very first impression, when I step on Philippine soil for the first time in 1976!); helpfulness, by taking care of somebody, who is weak and dependent... .
Believe me: your moment of virtue will never be destroyed by time's storm.
From writer Tiffanie Wen I learned this: “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” British naval historian and author Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote that opening line for an essay in The Economist in 1955, but the concept known as ‘Parkinson’s Law’ still lives on today.
Not only Tiffanie Wen - also I think about it every time I have a deadline. How long it takes me to write a story will by and large depend on when my deadline is and how much time I have until then. In his somewhat satirical essay Parkinson uses the example of an elderly lady writing a postcard to her niece. Since she has nothing else to do with her time, the otherwise simple task takes up her entire day.
Get more subordinates, create more work. When you have a deadline it’s like a storm ahead of you or having a truck around the corner. It’s menacing and it’s approaching, so you focus heavily on the task.
Can ‘menacing’ deadlines cure dallying?
So if the wider points Parkinson was making about bureaucracies still stand up today, what of his enduring first line? Today, while some researchers might chuckle at the mention of the ‘law’ that has come to mean so much more than its original intent, there’s also no doubt they know what it is referring to. Is there some truth to the notion that without strict time constraints, we waste time and our work takes longer to complete?
Humans have a limited capacity for memory, attention and fatigue – or mental bandwidth, according to Eldar Shafir, a professor at Princeton and co-author of Scarcity, a book that looks at the psychology of having less than we need and how it drives our behaviors. “Because our attentional capacity is limited, we divide it sporadically any way we can as we run through everyday life,” he says. But sometimes, of necessity, we need to knuckle down.
And there’s always the chance that rushing to accomplish something in too few hours can have drawbacks as well, particularly if your deadline is set by somebody else. “If your deadline is too short and you’re panicking, you will have sacrificed other things and you might work inefficiently, and things might go badly anyway,” he says.
“People like to say if it wasn’t for the last minute, nothing would get done. But research shows people’s productivity is not linear,” says Elizabeth Tenney, an assistant professor at the University of Utah’s Eccles School of Business who has written about time pressure and productivity. “When people sit down to do a task, they’ll put in a lot of effort initially. At some point there’s going to be diminishing returns on extra effort. To optimize productivity, you need to maximize benefits and minimize costs and find that inflection point, which is where you should start to wrap up.”
That might not mean taking up the full time allotted or working all the way up to your deadline, she says. “Cut yourself off rather than keep tinkering for all time.”
Hurry, jump out of the bed, now!
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