Be Your Best

Todd Gifford - Success Coach

It’s the words that you never want to hear when you are flying.  The odds are pretty low that you would ever hear these words, but unfortunately, I did hear those words recently on a flight out of Dallas, TX.  With about 20 minutes to go in the flight, cruising along nicely, enjoying a fairly quiet and smooth flight — over the loud speaker the flight attendant said: “Folks, we are going to be doing an Emergency Landing, and we will need everyone to practice the Emergency Landing Position.  The jet airliner wing flaps are non-operable so the pilots cannot slow down the airplane for landing.”

With that announcement, it got very quiet.  Beyond the practicing of the emergency landing position (which by the way does not seem like it would help much if the plane did crash), my mind started racing and processing at a very fast rate.  It was like I shifted it into super high gear.  I started to think about: my family and what we talked about in our last conversations, what I would do if we had a ‘bad’ landing, how I could potentially communicate with my wife in the next 10 minutes, what open major projects were on my plate, I reflected on which major goals I had accomplished and which ones I had not, thought about some new life goals I had never thought of before…I was getting a lot done in a very short amount of time!

We approached the runway at full steam and in a very steep approach, and I could see flashing lights all over the place, with fire trucks and other vehicles moving out onto the airfield.  That did not make things seem any better.  We slammed down hard on the runway and the pilots threw the jet engines in reverse to slow the plane down.  All things considered, a very good landing.  We were on the ground and everything turned out ok.  Why do I tell you this story?

The reason I tell this story is because of the power that a deadline and complete focus has on getting things done, and how we can perform at unheard of high levels when everything is on the line.

When a deadline was imposed on me during the flight (no pun intended), all of a sudden my brain went into overdrive, blocked out distractions, and I started to process a large amount of information.  I had no choice.  “Imminent deadline.”  The takeaway from this is that

when you can put yourself in a ‘gun-to-the-head’ situation in needing to get something accomplished, your productivity, clarity, and focus increases dramatically.  So what really is an ‘emergency landing’ announcement or a gun-to-your-head situation?  It’s a deadline.  And this deadline shrinks the amount of time (and effort — I will get to this in a minute) required to complete the project or task at hand.

For the reason this phenomenon happens, we need to turn to a fundamental principle that I became aware of via author Tim Ferriss and his College Professor, called “Parkinson’s Law”.   Parkinson’s Law says that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” and “a task will swell in [perceived] importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for completion.”  You can probably imagine why this fundamental principle was conveyed by a College Professor — yep, a major term paper due with an ‘extension’ requested.  The professor basically said “I am confident you will complete it on time.  You will be fine.”  Of course the paper did get completed and got an A.  An all-nighter plus a huge amount of caffeine and focus produced a stellar outcome … Parkinson’s Law.  With an imminent deadline soon ahead, you cut through the clutter, waste little energy, and focus on only the things that matter most to achieve the outcome.

What I have learned is that imminent, ‘gun-to-your-head’ deadlines not only need to be set on anything important you want or need to get done, but they need to be set with uncomfortably short timeframes.  Why? Otherwise, Parkinson’s Law (they don’t call it a ‘law’ for nothing) allows the work to expand to the timeframe provided.  You actually create wasted work and activity that did not need to exist to complete the outcome.

You can prove this law to yourself by reflecting back on the last work day before you were going on a long vacation.  Got loads of stuff done in a very short period of time, like maybe in the last 3 hours of that day?  Amazing levels of efficiency and effectiveness and it all worked out fine.  Imminent Deadline.  Parkinson’s Law.

Todd Gifford – President, DEE Electronics