Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

When I flipped my Personal MBA today, I laughed hard as my eyes fell on these words;

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Cyril Parkinson, Naval Historian and Management Theorist

I did that because I know that as much as I am guilty of procrastination in certain areas of my life I also have first-hand experience with shutting everything out and getting something done in little time than it would have taken.

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For instance, working on #leoglossary, there are days that our power company tries my patience and only leaves it for a few hours. And because I know they can be unpredictable, I always find a way to make sure once they are around, I am fully focused and finish all that I have to do before they go boom into darkness and receive a series of curses under my breath.

The truth is Parkinson is right! We procrastinate a lot. We have something we want but we would rather go round in circles pretending to be busy while we are basically achieving nothing. We keep postponing what could be done today till tomorrow. The moment tomorrow comes, we shift it again to the next day. Before we know it, the week is over, and soon, it turns into months and finally years. Then we begin to ask how time flies by so fast.

Ultimately time waits for no one. It constantly ticks away with no care in the world. Time doesn't care if you've had breakfast or not. It doesn't care if you have set up that emergency fund or not. It doesn't care if your investment portfolio is ongoing or still getting postponed. Time only cares about what it does... Moving.

You can't stop it from moving, all you can do is move with it. As the clock ticks, you should remind yourself to save yourself the troubles of regretting the past and start considering learning that new skill, start writing that book, or maybe start with a blog post, stop by, read that blog, and leave that comment. Step out of your comfort zone and take that risks. Whatever it is you have been doubting yourself over the last few years, as you step into making new resolutions for the year, don't forget that having dreams and desires is completely different from setting goals. And that you need the latter to make the former come true. Again, even though you have those goals, in Denzel Washington's words, as seen in one of his videos, you can't wait around, you need to show up, every every day, consistently.

It's only by doing so, will you be able to attack consistency head-on, and it will drive your goals all the way to fulfilling your dreams. The truth is consistency opens doors that seem almost impossible to cross in the past. You will be able to see clearly things that were unclear to you by showing up and attacking those goals head-on.

It doesn't matter how rich and influential you want to be, if you keep procrastinating, like Parkinson said, the timeline for you to achieve those dreams will take as long as you keep idling around until you start getting something done.

This doesn't mean you should be in so much of a hurry to finish something whose timeline is ideally a year in one week. No! It only means you should stop wasting so much time and start from somewhere. As you progress a lot of things will begin to make sense to you and you might be able to hasten your progress in the right means possible or take it as slow as it would help you achieve them perfectly.

Do something that brings you closer to your dreams today! You owe yourself that much!