Anyone know Parkinson’s law? Here it is in geek speak:

“A task will expand directly in proportion with the time allotted to it”

In English:

If you’re told you have a week to clean the house, you’ll make the task so massive in your head that you never start it. It’ll also then take you a horribly long time. However, if you get a “You’ve got 60-minutes to clean the house” you will work out what things you need to do in order for the place to considered “clean”.

The same thing applies to work, and outsourcing. At Advantix we do a metric shit-ton of outsourcing on a weekly basis and what we’ve worked out is that the number of people that hit 1 month deadlines is non existent, the number that hit 1 week deadlines is slightly more and the number that hit 1 day deadlines is about 90%. What Sabrina will do is split up tasks into short 1 day tasks and give them to different people. The result of this is you get 7 days worth of work done in a single day and people actually hit deadlines.

We can be all psychological and analyse this but here’s the takeaway:

Give yourself and any outsourcers small tasks. 24-48 hours works best. They’re easier to start, and ultimately easier to finish.