When it comes to scheduling, good scheduling stems on the observations of Cyril Northcote Parkinson, C. Northcote Parkinson was an officer in the British Army during the Second World War. And he noticed that when other officers were away from Camp, rather than his workload going up, he went down. And he kind of figured that a lot of the work that the officers were doing was generated by other officers. He got interested in workload, and he studied work practices in the British civil service. And he came up with a statement that is now known as Parkinson's Law. Parkinson's Law says work expands to fill the time available.

And no, that's true. You know that if you come into the office and you've got nothing much on, you can spend pretty much your whole morning, checking your emails. If you come into the workshop and you haven't got my phone, you can spend pretty much the whole morning, sorting out your tools and tidying up. But if you come into the office, and you've got three reports to write and two meetings to do, and then you get five minutes before lunch, you can probably check through your emails, delete loads of them and deal with the others in those five to 10 minutes. Likewise, if you've got something important to do in the workshop, you can tidy up really quickly and leave yourself plenty of time to do the job. Work expands to fill the time available.

And there's a classic description that illustrates this better than any other and it's the description of the stones bucket. Imagine that you have a bucket and inside that bucket, you put some big rocks Until we can get no more big rocks into the bucket. Is it full? No, of course it's not. Because if you get a handful of stones, you can sprinkle them on the bucket, shake the bucket, and the stones will percolate through and fill the gaps between the rocks. So you add more and more stones till you can get no more stones on.

Is it cool? Because if you've got a handful of sand, and you sprinkle it on and you shake the bucket, the sand fills the gaps between the stones that fill gaps between the rocks. And if you tamp it all down really hard. Is it for? Pretty much Yes. But you know, and I know that this is a metaphor about what you can do to fill the time in your day.

So it's very likely that that Sandy bucket could soak up a nice glass of wine or a pint of beer or a cup of tea or a mug of coffee very nicely indeed. But we're not gonna do that. What we're gonna do is we're gonna hit that bucket up We're going to sort our contents into a pile of sand, a pile of stones and a pile of rocks. But this time, we're gonna take the sand and put it in first to form a layer. Then we're going to take the stones, and we're going to drop that in to form another layer. Now, will we be able to get all of the rocks?

No, we won't, because we've already filled part of the bucket with layers of sand stones and tasks, and time behave in very much the same way. If you start your day by filling it with small tasks, then it won't be surprising. If at the end of the day, you have some big tasks left over. So the right way to schedule your time is to start by scheduling the big rocks. And when you schedule the big rocks, schedule that stones in amongst them, and then the littlest things, checking your emails filtering through your email. For your post, those little things that conversation with a colleague that only take a couple of minutes here or cabinets there, fit them in around those things, and your day will be far more productive.

In the next video, we're going to look at where to place the big rocks in your day. So I've said schedule them first. But that doesn't necessarily mean do them all at the beginning of the day, it means put them in your diary, and then put the other ones in. So we're going to look at where to put the big rocks. But the problem with rocks and stones of sand is they all kind of look the same. So in the next video, I'm going to change the metaphor for rocks and stones and sand to elephants and sheep and mice, elephants, your big, mentally demanding complex substantial tasks, mice, good teeny weeny tasks and sheep.

Your biggish worthwhile tasks In the next video about scheduling