Parkinson’s Law and Blogging
July 18, 2008 by Liz Fuller
Filed under Social Media
How long does it take to write a blog post??
Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fit the time available for it.
In other words, if you have two hours for writing a blog post, then you will spend time
- surfing the web for ideas
- researching background material on the idea
- reading what others have said in the past about the idea
- looking for a unique angle that hasn’t been used before
- writing a lengthy article about the idea
- editing the article
- previewing the article
- editing the article again
- previewing the article again
- including links of other relevant posts
- testing all of the links
- selecting an appropriate picture to illustrate the idea
- crediting the photographer for creating the picture
- previewing the post one last time
- publishing the post
- viewing the final site to ensure it all looks good
and writing a blog post will take two hours!
On the other hand, if you only have a few minutes to post you might just:
- come up with an idea off the top of your head
- write a few paragraphs or even a list of bullet points
- or maybe ask your readers a provocative question and let them fill in the blanks
- and hit the Publish button!
and writing a blog post will only take a few minutes!
So – what do you think? Does work take longer simply because you have more time for it? Do you get just as much done when you have less time to do it?
Is the key to productivity – really having way too much to do????
