Manufacturing Your Own Constraints

I procrastinate a LOT. So people are always confused when they find out I graduated high school 2 years early. How the hell does a chronic procrastinator end up two years ahead of schedule?

That’s when I hit them with my favorite rant ever about Parkinson’s Law.

Now I’ll spare you the rant, but to sum it up, work expands to fill the time available, which means it also shrinks to fit whatever time you give it.

I never stop procrastinating (heck just ask my mom about all the chores I do right before she wakes up). But I do move my deadlines around in very specific ways so from everyone else’s point of view, I’m early.

The school I went to ran on a 6 week cycle schedule and it was also project based learning. I quickly realized that basically everyone at the school did the entirety of their project in week 5, myself included. But no matter how late I started, I still always managed to submit on time. So I decided to experiment a bit…

For context my school didn’t cap how many classes you could register for, as long as their scheduled time didn’t overlap. I knew that I wouldn’t let myself miss a deadline, so I decided to deliberately double my workload one cycle.

I split my classes into 2 groups, 1 group would be done by week 3, with 2 weeks spent improving the project and the grade, and the other group would be started on week 5 and finished by the week 6 deadline.

Now obviously this worked well, starting some projects earlier meant I had more time to get work done, and improve my grades. You’re probably thinking well no sh-t sherlock

But the crazy thing is I was able to double my workload, adjust my timelines internally, and nothing suffered. The actual lesson is that the deadlines set by other people don’t need to be your deadline. Experimenting with how much you are actually capable of doing in a given time frame can allow you to better prioritize tasks and deliver work sooner or with less stress. Sometimes it can be hard to motivate yourself to do something sooner than someone else’s timeline. So call someone on your team, or a friend and tell them that you’re committed to finishing something in 1 week rather than the 2 week deadline that it actually is. I promise you, you will be amazed by your ability to just get stuff done.

So that’s how 4 years of work became 2, and then I realized Parkinson’s law could be applied to something else entirely.

This paradox isn’t just true with time but also money.

Earlier this year I got a 25k grant from Emergent Ventures to build my own lab. Now when it comes to lab equipment 25k isn’t exactly a lot, but it required me and my friend to be extremely creative and mindful in our approach to building the lab. If we had 100k we could just splurge on every piece of lab equipment that we think we might need and then only use the equipment once (which happens a lot to startups and companies!).

So we mapped out exactly what equipment we needed and… it cost more than 25k. So we decided to build our own lab equipment. Now obviously you can’t do this with all types of equipment, but machines like a tensile tester, or a heat deflection tester, or a fume hood each have a simple purpose:

1. Pull an object apart to measure its tensile strength
2. Heat an object up to check when it becomes a rubbery state and starts to lose form
3. Remove fumes before they reach you and the rest of your workspace

Each machine cost between 5-12k, and would have resulted in us going way over budget + we still needed other stuff. So we bought a bunch of sensors, a 3d printer, some 40x40 aluminum extrusion, a portable stove top and built the machines ourselves.

We spent about 1-2k on each of these machines, and the machines served our purpose better than the off-the-shelf versions would have. Because we built them ourselves, we modified them with sensors that hooked up to our software, recorded results faster, and built them specific to our use case.

Parkinson’s law is usually given as a warning to people about giving themselves too much time to complete a task. But if you inverse it, it becomes a literal superpower. Shrink the amount of time you have, or the amount of money, and your work + creativity will stretch to make it happen.