Work expands to fill the available time

It is true to say that, certainly for employees, that many people allow the volume of planned or urgent/available tasks they have at work to denote how they spend their time during the course of a working day. So say there are four major tasks to complete in the course of a 9 to 5 day, this will tend to take the maximum hour and forty five minutes available for each task along with an hour for lunch of course. This is human nature and tends to happen regardless of how long it should actually take to complete each task were time of the essence.

Having worked '9 to 5' myself for many years I can well understand the attraction of doing absolutely no more than the minimum and as a lazy person by inclination it still has its draw. The game changer for me though of course is working for oneself - it is all very well being lazy but doing nothing earns me nothing.

It's interesting but today I had two meetings, one at 10.00am and another at 1.30 pm - geographically they were not too far apart but far enough to prevent me access to my office for any more than about 30 minutes in total today until after 8.30pm with other non work commitments in the evening. The fact that I was out of the office for most of the day doesn't mean though that my other admin and client commitments went away so I have had to just cram more into my time between meetings than actually seemed possible on my way out of the house this morning.

Of course I will still need to catch up with some e-mails and other stuff this evening but rather than allowing the task to expand to fill the available time I think today that I've been able to control the tasks and schedule them appropriately to optimize work done.

As a last word today I've had several emails and comments about the blog in the last few days - all complimentary thankfully. So I just wanted to say 'Hi' to new readers and welcome ! - I hope you enjoy and find it interesting or useful (or indeed both !) Please tell all your friends and colleagues about it if you think they might be interested.