Science Says
More Time Will Not Save You (Science Backed Fix)
Transcript:
You dream of having more time. Just one extra day a week, or maybe even an extra hour or two, so you can actually do the work that matters.
Here’s what nobody’s telling you. For most freelancers and small business owners, more free time makes your productivity worse, not better.
By the end of this post, you’re going to know exactly why, and you’ll have a one-day experiment that will keep you from falling into this trap. Or if you’re in there, it’ll get you out of it.
If you just want to jump straight to the action items, you can grab the free tool here. But I think really understanding the background, why this works and what to look for, is key to getting the most out of this trick. So please stay with me if you want the full picture.
Parkinson’s Law: The Joke That Turned Out To Be True
Here’s what’s actually happening, and it has a name. It might even be a name you’ve heard.
In 1955, a British historian named Parkinson wrote a satirical essay for The Economist. He was roasting government bureaucracy and threw in a one-liner almost as a joke: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Yeah, that’s right. It was a joke, not a science paper. He was mocking civil servants who created busy work just to stay occupied. But researchers tested the underlying idea and found that the joke is kind of on all of us, because it turns out it holds up way beyond government offices.
Give people more unstructured time and the work doesn’t get done faster. It just spreads to fill whatever space you give it.
So when your slow season finally arrives and somehow nothing gets done? That’s not a you problem. That’s Parkinson’s Law doing exactly what it does. But that’s not a very helpful explanation. What’s really going on, and how can we stop it?
The YouTuber Who Finally Got Her Dream Schedule
I watched this play out recently with a client of mine. She’d been building her YouTube channel around a full-time job for years. Exhausting, filming on the weekends, late nights, just making it work in the time that she could.
She was tired, and she had that dream of building the channel to replace her income and finally go all in. And she did it, which was awesome.
But something really unexpected happened once she got there. Her output dropped.
She thought she’d finally have all this time to increase her video output and still have room to spare. But that’s not what happened. She was getting way less done with a full open calendar than she ever had with a packed one.
She was feeling so defeated and really confused. She thought something must be wrong with her.
Nothing was wrong with her. The structure her old job had accidentally provided, like those hard stops, the forced deadlines, the boundary of a commute, had been doing work she didn’t even know it was doing. When the structure disappeared, everything expanded to fill that space.
The Two-Timer Method
So if unstructured time is what expands, is the solution to just add things to our calendar? Actually, no. That doesn’t work for a lot of people without this step first.
You just need two timers. That’s it. You may have heard productivity experts tell you to use a timer, but not this way. Promise.
Timer one is your work timer. Clock in when you start work, clock out when you actually stop. And I really mean stop. If you imagine that you worked an office job that ran on a clock-in/clock-out schedule, what would your boss expect you to clock out for? Going to do laundry: clock out. Grocery run: clock out.
But if you’re running to the bathroom, you probably wouldn’t be clocking out for that. What about gray areas? Things we all probably would do, like making a personal call? You might just head to the bathroom for a minute, right? You’re not going to clock out. So stay clocked in.
The rule is simple. If you wouldn’t have to clock out for it at a regular job, keep the timer running. If you would, stop it.
Timer two is your impact timer. This one only runs when you’re doing your chosen impact activity.
A side note here: if you’ve tried using a timer before and you tried to time everything, it can be exhausting. If you’re able to time additional things individually, that’s awesome. But I coach a lot of people who get basically timer burnout pretty quickly trying to do this. So I’d advise just sticking with your chosen impact activity the first go.
When I ran this experiment on myself, I was a freelance translator and my impact activity was billable hours. I wanted to know how much time I was actually spending translating. For you, it might also be client work, or maybe it’s content creation, business development, or working on your business instead of in it. Whatever work makes the biggest difference in your business right now, or whatever you really care about knowing the answer about.
Run both throughout your day. At the end, subtract. You’re going to have three total times: the time you clocked in for the very first time until the time you clocked out for the very last time, the time on the work timer within that, and then the time on your impact timer within that.
Now, if your first reaction to all of this is oh my gosh, you told me to use a timer, that’s so annoying, good. That reaction is really important, and it’s actually this strategy working in your favor. I’ll explain exactly why in a minute. But let me get to my numbers, and get ready. They’re embarrassing.
My Numbers (Embarrassing Edition)
I ran this experiment on myself way before coaching, before any of this, because I was grinding through what felt like brutal days, and I just wasn’t sure I could carry on. I considered getting a full-time job and leaving the industry completely.
I started at 7:00 a.m. I sent my last project through at 9:00 p.m. I was wrecked, telling myself, nope, can’t keep doing this, 14-hour days suck.
So what did the timer say? The hours I actually spent translating?
Pause for a second and say out loud, or even comment on the video, what you think my impact timer said. Just for fun.
Okay. It was 4 hours.
Four. Out of what felt like 14.
I stared at it in just utter disbelief and embarrassment. I mean, come on. How do you work all day, exhausted, and end up with 4 hours of real output? I was tired. Super tired.
And that’s exactly the right question, because it’s what most productivity advice totally misses. One timer would have shown me 9 hours worked. Two timers, and the differences between all three times, showed me the truth.
The gap between total hours worked and actual impact hours exists for everybody, and almost no one is measuring it. And if you’ve ever felt like sometimes your days are crazy productive and sometimes a slogfest, time might not be the only resource you should be looking at. I have a whole video on that too.
Why The Gap Is Almost Always Bigger Than People Expect
When you own your own schedule, the boundary between work and everything else starts to collapse. The laundry doesn’t feel like stopping work. It feels like multitasking. The grocery run feels like freedom. The errand, the personal call, all of it starts to bleed into the workday because there’s nothing structural stopping it.
And it might even feel like productivity. Oh, look at all this stuff I’m getting done. I got my grocery run done.
But every single time this happens, you pay a hidden cost that doesn’t show up on the clock. Research on task switching consistently finds that every time you redirect your attention from one thing to another, there is a real cognitive overhead, a cost you pay just to get back up to speed on what you were doing before (Rogers & Monsell, 1995). It’s not imaginary.
Research on interrupted work found something that explains the exhaustion piece even better: fragmented days cost more effort and take a bigger psychological toll, even when the work gets done (Zijlstra et al., 1999). Which is crazy.
And it’s exactly why an interrupted, scattered 9 hours felt like 14 to me. It’s the measurable cost of fragmentation accumulating across every single switch, every single interruption, every single time you step away and come back, especially when they’re not even intentional. We’re not talking about a lunch break here, and we’re not talking about a normal intentional break.
Why Hating The Timer Means It’s Going To Work
Remember when I said that if running two timers sounds annoying, that’s actually good and the strategy working in your favor? Here’s what I meant. There are two ways this affects you beyond just getting the data.
The self-monitoring effect. Research on self-monitoring consistently finds that the act of tracking itself changes behavior. People eat better when they log their food. They move more when they wear a step counter (Patel et al., 2021). So we’re more likely to use our time better when we track it. The awareness alone shifts the behavior.
The annoyance avoidance effect. I came up with that name to make it simple. It’s not in research papers that I know of. Here’s what I mean. If you’re someone who bounces between tasks constantly, running two timers is going to be really irritating. You’re going to have to stop and start it constantly. Checked email for 5 minutes, back to client work for 4 minutes, jumped to LinkedIn for 20.
Here’s what happens. You start batching things together just to avoid the frustration of stopping and starting that stupid timer. You stop switching so much because the timer makes every switch visible and annoying.
This means this strategy isn’t just collecting data. Both of these things are already having an actual impact.
Why Not Just Time Block?
So how is this different from the standard fix for Parkinson’s Law? Most productivity advice will tell you to add structure: set artificial deadlines, time block your calendar. And honestly, that’s not wrong.
If you’re someone who responds really well to self-imposed deadlines, if you open your calendar and actually follow it block by block, time blocking really works. It works really, really well.
But if you’ve tried that and the blocked time just kind of sits there ignored, or you blow past your own deadlines because who’s going to stop you?, you’re not broken at all. You just aren’t at the stage of trusting a system like that yet. And that’s a lot of people. Time blocking is an intervention, and it’s often applied to the wrong diagnosis.
Productivity strategies are kind of like medicine. Sure, antibiotics work, but not if you sprained your ankle. Same thing here. Let’s not apply the wrong productivity strategy to the wrong diagnosis.
The really great thing about the two-timer strategy is that it doesn’t require you to stick to a schedule. It just requires you to measure what actually happened. And measurement comes first, because how are you going to fix something if you have no idea what’s happening and you can’t see it?
If time blocking is already working for you, please keep doing it. Just run the two timers alongside it and you’re going to get even better data. If it hasn’t worked, the two timers are probably the better solution for your productivity diagnosis.
What Happened To My YouTube Client
She didn’t go back to her old job. She built the structure the job had been providing for free. Protected windows for filming, hard stops on her calendar, clear boundaries around what counted as work and what didn’t.
And her output came back. Within a few weeks, she was producing far more than she ever had. Not because she finally had enough time, but because she was being honest about what was happening and working with her brain, not against it. She developed the awareness, and then executed a plan to fix it.
And here’s what I want you to take from that. My story and her story are actually the same story. One of us was overworked, one was underworked, but we were both unstructured, both letting time run us instead of us choosing what time was going to be for what.
Understanding the reality of where we were is what allowed the right diagnosis, and therefore the right solution, instead of trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
We all have an invisible gap between hours worked and hours that actually mattered. The gap is never going to be zero. But it also doesn’t have to be the size of the Grand Canyon either. I’ve seen it with myself and nearly every client who comes to me convinced that they just need more time. After this launch, after this busy season.
More time is not the prescription. The visibility is.
One Day Is Enough
You don’t need a month of data to learn something real. You don’t even need a week. One day is going to show you something.
The more detailed you can make that impact timer, the better. But if all you track is that one impact activity, you’re still going to get some great data points. If you can track how long you were emailing and on LinkedIn and all of that, of course it’s going to be a lot better.
It might show you that email is eating twice what you thought. It might show you, like it showed me, that the gap between how long your day feels and how much impact you actually created is a lot bigger than you ever could have imagined.
So: one day, two timers. That is the whole entire ask.
If you can do it for a week or even a month instead, you’re going to start seeing patterns. That’s when you have real information to make decisions. But just start with one day.
The better season that you’ve been waiting for might come. I really hope it does. But if the structure and understanding isn’t there when it arrives, that time is going to fill up with something. It always does.
Parkinson figured this out in 1955, making fun of bureaucrats. And I’ve watched it be true with every single client who finally gets that open calendar they’ve been waiting for, including one who built a whole YouTube channel around a dream of having more time, only to find that time alone wasn’t what she thought it would be.
More time is often not the fix. Seeing your day clearly is the fix.
You can grab the free tool to help you run this experiment here.
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Sources
- Parkinson, C.N. (1955). Parkinson’s Law. The Economist, November 19, 1955. https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law
- Rogers, R.D., & Monsell, S. (1995). Costs of a predictable switch between simple cognitive tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124(2), 207–231. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.124.2.207
- Zijlstra, F.R.H., Roe, R.A., Leonora, A.B., & Krediet, I. (1999). Temporal factors in mental work: Effects of interrupted activities. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 72(2), 163–186. https://doi.org/10.1348/096317999166581
- Patel, M.L., Wakayama, L.N., & Bennett, G.G. (2021). Self-Monitoring via Digital Health in Weight Loss Interventions: A Systematic Review Among Adults with Overweight or Obesity. Obesity, 29(3), 478–499. https://doi.org/10.1002/oby.23088
- Goldstein, S.P., Goldstein, C.M., Bond, D.S., Raynor, H.A., Wing, R.R., & Thomas, J.G. (2019). Associations between self-monitoring and weight change in behavioral weight loss interventions. Health Psychology, 38(12), 1128–1136. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0000800
- Compernolle, S., DeSmet, A., Poppe, L., Crombez, G., De Bourdeaudhuij, I., Cardon, G., van der Ploeg, H.P., & Van Dyck, D. (2019). Effectiveness of interventions using self-monitoring to reduce sedentary behavior in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 16:63. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-019-0824-3
