“If you wait until the last minute, it only takes one minute.”
I love this. I love it a lot.
Strangely, very few other people in my life feel the same way. My wife doesn’t think it’s funny (she’s a planner). My responsible friends think it’s completely backwards. Even my college professors back in the day, those paragons of wisdom, didn’t like it one bit.
I’m 43 and still think it’s more right than it is wrong. But first let’s talk about traffic.
Imagine you’re in a busy part of town, headed towards a shopping center. There’s two left turn lanes at the next big intersection that lead to the shopping center, and the entrance is the first right once you get through the intersection.
90% of people will try to stay in the rightmost left turn lane because they think they’re being smart by preparing to make the right in the shopping center. I know this because I see it over and over. The problem is that 90% of people choose this, and then the single lane of people waiting for the turn backs up into the road and gets worse and worse and all the while the other left hand turn has at most 2 or 3 cars in it.
These drivers are optimizing for the wrong thing, thinking too far ahead. The first problem is to get you and as many others through the left hander as quickly as possible. Then you can deal with the next step. There’s actually a reason designers choose to use two turn lanes: there’s a high level of traffic flow there.
Donald Knuth famously said that “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. He was talking about some very specific details about scheduling, but it works in general circumstances too. Here’s another Knuth quote on the same topic:
Rules for Optimization:
Don’t do it
(For experts only) Don’t do it yet.
The point is that when we evaluate problems, we rarely do it with perfect efficiency the first time. Optimization is fun. It’s exciting. But it’s also rare that optimization is really the thing you need. There’s usually a pile of hard or annoying or frustrating or tedious things you have to do first. Maybe the tedious things could be automated, but that’s also an expert’s call.. so you should do a bunch of the tedious things first! Become an expert.
Responsible and capable people usually worry excessively and over-plan. This is occasionally necessary, and the positive signal these cases bring makes us over-plan everywhere. For these responsible and capable people, the idea of waiting until the last minute serves as a fence against the preoccupation with planning, prioritizing, and scheduling. For most of our lives, we should function as a just-in-time compiler: focused on what’s in the immediate future.
Because here’s the thing about priorities: they are revealed by our actions. You can state whatever you want, that doesn’t make it a priority. Merlin Mann got this exactly right:
“A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority.”
When most people say, “prioritize,” I think they really mean to say, “force-rank” — to assign n items one and only one position between “1” and ”n.” Right? So, yes, there’s one “#1” and one “#7,” et cetera. But that’s not “priority,” and that’s why you probably have at least one task on your version of a to-do list that has been ”HIGH PRIORITY!!!” for more than a month.
Got news for you, Jack: if it moves, it’s not a priority. It’s just a thing you haven’t done yet.
Making something a BIG RED TOP TOP BIG HIGHEST #1 PRIORITY changes nothing but text styling. If it were really important, it’d already be done. Period. Think about it.
If you really need to do something, you’d handle it today. Right now. This minute.
There’s still plenty of conversation to have about what’s urgent vs. what’s important. These sorts of tradeoffs are crucial, but the idea of waiting until the last minute helps determine whether you need to plan at all! It shifts the focus from what to play to whether to plan. We usually slipside into the former without considering the former.
Which is the main point. The phrase “If you wait until the last minute, it only takes one minute” is actually a corollary to Parkinson’s Law:
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
If you schedule a meeting for an hour, it’s going to take an hour. A 30 minute phone call will take 30 minutes. Three days set aside for a key slideshow presentation will take all 3 days.
But this isn’t just about time: LOTS of things expand to fill whatever space is available whether that’s your attention, your brain space, or your physical capacity.
Remember this when you’re so eager to atomize your life and fill your schedule.