Parkinson's Law: It's Real, So Use It

Putting challenging timeboxes on projects in a healthy environment can lead to serious innovation and creativity. Doing the same with impossible timeboxes in a toxic environment will lead to all of the bad things that you expect.

This tempo and cadence is crucial for effective leadership. Even though you may not think that people want it, and even if people themselves think they don't want it, knowing that things need to be done by deadlines that are just on the cusp of the comfort zone forces real, tangible progress. If you think that a prototype might take a month, why no

When you are asking people to do something, lead with a recommendation of when it should be done by. Be explicit about this, but open to negotiation. It's such a simple technique, but when you compound its usage over a year at a big company, you will be amazed at the difference it makes.

Projects that don't have deadlines imposed on them, even if they are self-imposed, will take a lot longer than they need to, and may suffer from feature creep and scope bloat.

By setting challenging deadlines you will actually get better results. It's all about manipulating the Iron Triangle of scope, resources, and time.

If you've not come across the Iron Triangle before, the idea is that it represents the three key constraints of a project:

• Scope , which is the work that needs to be completed.

• Resources , which are the people and tools that are available to do the work.

• Time is, unsurprisingly, the amount of time that you have to get it done. Who'd have thought

Deadlines really help human beings get things done. The only way that I've written books is because I set myself a challenging, but not impossible, schedule with the publisher. This contract of external accountability keeps the fire going through the long slog, and it forces me to make clear-cut decisions about what to include, what to leave out, a