Productivity gains and Parkinson’s law
JC’s Newsletter #204
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Productivity gains and Parkinson’s law
This essay was written by my co-founder Charles Gorintin.
At Alan we believe in gains in productivity, and we see them coming through personal efficiency, AI, better tooling… We count on these gains to reach our ambitious objectives for 2024.
Yet when gaining productivity we have to fight Parkinson’s law: “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”. The example given in the eponymous book (from 1955!) is of a businessman sending a letter in 3 minutes, vs an old lady spending a whole day to send a postcard.
Basically, we could gain a lot of efficiency, then just spend our time gaining on inefficiency and a false sense of busyness.
With AI-driven tools, tasks that used to take hours are now completed in minutes, so we get either a significant output boost or we get complacency where time savings are wasted in a lax approach to task management.
The real challenge then lies in how we invest the time saved thanks to AI and technology.
Do we channel these gains towards enhancing the quality of our work, exploring creative solutions, and expanding our skills, or do we allow ourselves to fall victim to Parkinson's Law?
To combat this human tendency, we need to create an environment where we're slightly stretched – engaged and efficient, but not overwhelmed. We set stricter deadlines, we define clear goals, and we focus on the impact of our work.
We can reinvest the time gained into the quality of our product, or in just doing more stuff.
The more efficient Alaners are, the less people we need for a project, and in effect we reduce communication overhead.
Once we are aware of the tendency for work to expand, we can start setting ambitious goals, and strive to be slightly stretched. That way, we can ensure that our increased efficiency leads to higher quality work and more significant achievements for the whole of Alan.
Some good articles I have read this week
👉 Decoding the Huberman Phenomenon: Science Meets Society (Part 1) (The Health 3.0 Newsletter)
Should we be more inspired by how Huberman shares his content, easy-to-implement tips?
Both for our podcast series and our health offer approach.
👉 Gokul Rajaram on X (X)
"What we do in our business this year will drive our results three years down the line."
Every action, initiative and investment in 2024 will ripple through to 2026. Sow seeds in 2024 that you can harvest in 2026 and beyond.
👉 Amjad Masad on X (X)
"I've never found in my whole life that you could convince someone who doesn't want to work hard to work hard." - Steve Jobs
Really important for our hiring process & talent density.
👉 Early dinner, the key to reducing cardiovascular risk, according to a study (radiofrance)
Having dinner at 9 p.m. increases these cardiovascular risks (especially the risk of stroke) by 28% compared to those who usually have dinner an hour earlier, at 8 p.m., a figure that is even more true for women.
A longer duration of nightly fasting drastically reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease: the earlier dinner is had, further from the first meal of the next day, the more beneficial the effects, as noted in the study results published in Nature Communications.
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