Parkinson's law

We were looking it up.

It's called Parkinson's Law.

That work expands to fill the time you give it.

This is why I don't pack until late in the morning when we're leaving.

And magically, there is never anything left over.

Because of Parkinson's Law, which dictates that expenses will naturally expand to consume all available income.

The Save First framework requires you to completely remove willpower and future discounting from the equation.

How?

Two more quick things on this, and then I'll let you go about your day so you can start preparing.

So Elon Musk recently talked about something, well, not recently, but I heard an article or an interview from him that he said, he referenced Parkinson's law.

So Parkinson's law, for those of you guys who don't know, is that work expands the time allotted, right? And so I think what you don't want to do is over-prepare for the wrong thing.

And let me put my caveat there, is that...

I actually think there's tremendous ROI to cramming.

Meaning, he uses Parkinson's Law in reverse, which is that it also, if work expands the time allotted, it can also shrink to the time that you shrink to.

And there's a reason that kids cram.

It's because it's really high ROI on their time, right? If they prep for weeks and weeks, and then they take the week before the exam off and don't look at anything, sometimes they do worse than just cramming right before the test.

You essentially sensitize yourself to normal life.

Step four is setting a timer to gamify progress using Parkinson's Law.

And finally, step five, execute.

Timing these sprints is just as critical as the execution, which means knowing your chronotype.

And the challenge is, is that the machine has no limits.

Like Parkinson's Law says, "Work expands to fill available space," and that's always been true.

[laughs]

But now the machine has no limits, so it's like, "Hey, make it longer.

I know he's controversial, but he is very smart and has placed a lot of very good asymmetric bets over decades.

His question is roughly, and I'm paraphrasing, if you had to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next six months, what would you do? So applying Parkinson's Law, creating a very tight deadline for yourself, and I know this seems impossible, even if it's just as a thought exercise to journal on or to speak into Whisperflow, for instance, so it transcribes your 10-minute brain dump and you can throw it into something like Claude for cleanup, how would you answer that? And the point of a question like this is not to produce an answer automatically that allows you to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next six months.

It's to force you out of your routine ways of thinking.

It is to free you from constraints that perhaps you've artificially applied to the situation.