Understanding the Vacation Paradox

Parkinson's Law states that your workload will expand to whatever time you allocate for its completion. Thus, when you're willing to work late or to check on work stuff from your PDA at home, you're usually not really getting more done; instead, you're just being more wasteful with your time.

That's all well and good for those slackers out there, but not for hardworking folks like us who take pride in our personal productivity, right? As Dan Markovitz points out on Evolving Excellence, our smugness is ill-founded. To illustrate his point that everyone can benefit from a specific endpoint to the workday, he gives the example of the vacation paradox:

Even though you never seem to be able to get all your work done on a regular day, the day(s) right before you go on vacation, you somehow manage to crank through all your daily work plus the backlog of stuff that's been moldering on your desk for the past month. What's going on? Well, when you're short on time, you work more efficiently. You reduce the waste in your work process so that you can get stuff done. There's no choice, because you're on the plane to Maui or St. Moritz tomorrow.

Well I'm not headed off to Switzerland anytime soon, but I see his point. By specifying an end time to each workday and workweek, I can dig up the inefficiencies in my work habits and, hopefully, kill them off. Besides, it's a handy reason to go home early during the week and pretend that each weekend is really a pair of worry-free vacation days.