It causes me great anguish to admit it, but sometimes you can’t work less and get more done. Some things just take a certain amount of work. If you’re making lemonade out of all the lemons that life handed you, you just have to squeeze a lot of lemons. No matter how smart you work, life simply demands that you squeeze all those lemons. Completely. Even if you’re allergic to lemons and they make you sneeze. Life can be cruel.
Even though there’s no real way to work smarter, you might be able to work faster. You do that by finding ways to do things in parallel.
Parallelism: Do Something While Pregnant
Doing things in parallel means doing two things at the same time. Not actually at the exact same time, that would be multitasking, and thanks to the fine scientists at Stanford, we’ve known for almost ten years that multitasking fries your brain and turns you into a semi-coherent vegetable.
Doing things in parallel means that progress is being made on two parts of a project at once.
Consider babies. It takes nine months to make one of those. And no matter how hard you try, it still takes pretty much nine months. (So if you want one, you better get started. And won’t your shmoopie just cry and cry when you tell them the news! And I’m sure they’re tears of joy. What else would they be?)
But while you (or shmoopie, or your surrogate, or your test tube) are busy growing a baby, it all kinda happens automatically. While baby is growing and forming and starting to become a living, breathing being that will someday be a teenager and blame you for all its problems, you can spend your time knitting exciting clothes for baby, finishing your dissertation, and orchestrating the world’s first version of Bach’s toccata and fugue in D minor for strings and didgeridoo. And that’s parallelism: you’re making a baby over the same span of time as you’re making clothes, a PhD, and a musical masterpiece.
So how do you do parallelism?
Make Things Parallel by Automating
Sometimes you can use automation to make things go parallel. If you run an online business and do email marketing, sending out an email blast can take a few hours. That becomes a few hours you can use to work on something else. Yet work is still getting done because the automated stuff happens at the same time as the manual stuff.
Make Things Parallel by Delegating
Automating is really just a special kind of delegating, and delegating is the ultimate parallelism. When you find part of a task that can be done by someone else, delegate it to them. Then while they’re working, you can do other things.
The Wicked Witch of the West was an expert at delegating. She had an entire army of flying monkeys, and she knew how to use them. While they were hunting Dorothy and the Ruby Slippers, the Wicked Witch herself could be busy putting in place her plans to overthrow the Wizard. If she’d had to hunt down Dorothy, and then start planning her political career, it would have taken much longer.
If you need to prepare for a presentation, if you have minions, you can make great use of parallelism. Give your minions a rough sketch of the slides you need, and instructions to finish the slides (or be covered in honey and chained in the flying monkey feeding pens). While your minions are working so very, very hard to finish the slides, you can be rehearsing your presentation in the mirror, and admiring how wonderful you look in your…unique…naugahyde outfit.
You’ll be ready for the presentation far faster than if you’d done the slides yourself.
Make Things Parallel by Waiting for Others
You can also find opportunities for parallelism any time you’ll have to wait for other people. When you’re making focaccia from scratch, for example, you know in advance that at some point you’ll have to wait for the yeast to do their job and make the dough rise. You can plan to start preparing your toppings while the yeast is working. If you sequenced the bread making and the topping preparation, you’d be in the kitchen forever. And you’d smell like yeast.
You don’t have to get pregnant to enjoy the benefits of working in parallel.
Product manager Xris is launching a new line of autonomous killer drone kits for tots. It’s a very American toy. Xris knows the graphic design department takes a week to design packaging. Getting realistic looking shades of red is always tricky. So Xris finds work that doesn’t require the graphic design department, and schedules it while the designers are busily hunting down the perfect reference for their desired shade of red.
Find Parallelism in Your Daily Life
Now, it’s your turn to find parallelism in your own life and job. Choose a major multi-day or multi-week project on your plate. List the major subtasks that have to be done in that project.
Next, look for chances to work in parallel. Can some tasks be automated? Can some be delegated? Do some naturally include waiting for others?
When you’ve found your parallel opportunities, work them into your schedule. Start the parallel tasks together, so your machine, your minions, or your colleagues can be working away while you are, too.
You don’t have to get pregnant to enjoy the benefits of working in parallel. You can work faster by having things happen at the same time. When life gives you lemons, distribute them to a dozen minions to start squeezing. You’ll get 12 minion-hours worth of lemon juice in a single hour, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.
I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. Want great keynote speeches on productivity, Living an Extraordinary Life, or entrepreneurship? Hire me! Find me at http://SteverRobbins.com.
Image of man using parallelism © Shutterstock
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