Why you have no spare time

Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” (1)

How this affects you: Give yourself a week to complete a task and, lo and behold, it will probably take a week to complete said task.

The solution: set shorter deadlines.

Burn the boats: the downside of backup plans

“Burn the boats.”

The year is 1519. Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortés, has landed on—what is now—the Gulf Coast of Mexico (2). His mere presence on the beach is an act of pure defiance against the orders of his superior, the Governor of Cuba. Behind him lies an open sea and a Cuban platoon set to imprison him; before him, almost certain death. His mission? To conquer the formidable Aztec Empire. He had with him a mere 600 soldiers.

Cortés’ men were afraid, and rightly so. Some considered abandoning the mission and returning to Cuba.

Retreat was not an option for Cortés. Driven by an unrelenting thirst for glory, he issued an order to seal their fate: "Burn the boats."*

The message was as bold as it was final: there would be no retreat. The only path was forward.

Despite having relatively limited military experience, Cortés set forward with his soldiers and local tribe members to take the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán — a sprawling metropolis of 200,000 inhabitants.

Tenochtitlán fell.

Cortés story is undoubtedly epic. But how much wisdom is there really in the notion of ‘burning the boats’?

Some researchers sought to determine just this (3). Specifically, they explored whether and how making a backup plan reduces people’s performance when achieving a primary goal.

Backup Plan: "a plan for achieving a new goal in case a person’s primary goal proves unattainable such that this plan still leads to the achievement of the same superordinate goal". (3)

Across three experimental studies, they found that participants who were encouraged to consider a backup plan subsequently performed worse on sentence unscrambling tasks, successfully unscrambling fewer sentences. They further demonstrated that this effect was partly due to a reduced motivation to achieve the primary goal of the task, such as saving time or earning money.

They concluded:

• “Making a backup plan reduces primary goal performance.”
• “Making a backup plan reduces primary goal performance by dampening goal desire.”