Parkinson's Heuristic: The Only Time To Do Anything

Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fit the space allotted. The idea being, if you give someone a month to write a report, they'll take a month, but if you give them a week, they'll take a week, and then they'll have three weeks to do three other reports! The one-week and four-week reports won't be identical; but in my experience it is surprisingly often nearly as useful as the four-week version, and you get strictly more work out of people.(I, myself, am a special case of "people".)This is common knowledge, and the implied practical advice can be found in its dual:To reduce the work spent on completing a task, reduce the time allowed for it.A related question we might ask is: when is working on the task even worth it? It's famously the case that most work gets done just before a deadline. If we model the work getting compressed to the end with a pareto curve, the last 20% of the time produces 80% of the value. It's often taken as inspiration, that one can be so productive, and productive-hackers try to make all of their time this productive. But one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens, and in fact, I think most of the marginal effort spent before a deadline is sufficiently not worth it as to be better spent just chilling out. This leads me to a more practical heuristic.The only time to do anything is when you don’t quite have enough time to do it.It’s counterintuitive, but the only time that I ever clear my email inbox, is when I don’t quite have enough time to. During a week where I have a lot to do and am getting a lot of emails, I start getting through them fast. But if I have tons of free time, I spend tons of time thinking about and replying to individual emails. It's only when I barely have enough time that I prioritize appropriately.The fortnight before LessOnline is the time in the year that I make the highest density of improvements to the Lighthaven campus. The few days before I launch events are when I do the majority of the design