It’s Saturday. I am going for my 40-minute outdoor run. I place my AirPods in my ear. I press play. I am listening to the Tools of Titans audiobook by Tim Ferris. I am 5 minutes into my run. I hear something interesting. Peter Thiel asks, “How can you achieve your 10-year plan in 6 months?
What did he say?
How to do what?
I paused the audiobook and went through my running session, thinking about this idea.
Could this ever apply to me?
How do I make a practical application of this idea?
It turns out I can apply this idea to my writing career. I will explain later.
Parkinson’s Law
Peter’s idea comes from one of the fundamental laws of productivity – Parkinson’s law.
The concept is that work expands to fill the time to complete it. When we have a lot of time, we tend to spend all of it, regardless of whether it is a big or small job. If we are under pressure, we tend to work a lot quicker. When there is no pressure, we can hardly get up and start.
Without a deadline, there seems to be no incentive to act. Depending on our deadlines, we tend to do as much or as little as possible.
Suppose I have a whole day to write an article. Do I do it first thing in the morning? Nope. I never start on time. I am always looking at doing it later.
Suppose I am to clean my room. I almost always wait until the last minute to do it.
What if we can change this?
What if we can have a workaround?
What if we can give ourselves self-imposed pressure?
A workaround for this challenge is to set self-imposed deadlines and targets for yourself.
For example, my target is to publish two articles every week. Period. Forget quality. We are shooting for quantity here. So I sit down. I write. My ambitious target is to write a thousand words each day, no matter what. I will write more if I can.
With such self-imposed deadlines. I am writing more. I am publishing more. I am beginning to build more content on my website.
10 Years in 6 Months
However, Peter is stretching the idea a lot further. He is compressing. He is imposing a more difficult timeline. Stricter deadlines. Is he talking about imposing impossible deadlines?
For instance, I have a picture of what I want my blog to be in 10 years. Can I bring this picture to life in 6 months?
I want to write about 500 articles for my blog within five years. That comes to roughly two articles per week for five years.
The interesting question is – what if I could write all the articles in 6 months?
What is stopping me?
I got thinking, what if I can stretch Peter’s idea further?
30-Day Year Challenge
Can I impose stricter, impossible deadlines with closer time limits?
I want a 30 day year. I want to achieve more in a month than a year.
My goal this year is to write:
- A story a day – 365 short stories
- Two articles per week – 104 blog posts
Doing all this in 30 days means I have to write 12 stories plus four articles per day.
Can I do this?
I will give it a try.
By achieving this, I would have achieved my blogging goal for the year. This means I can move on to other goals.
It means squeezing as much as possible for each day. Yes, it’s a work in progress for me to shift mentally to this level.
Summary
Having self-imposed deadlines is a great way to pressure yourself to finish your tasks quickly. Planning a 30-day year is unique to condense so much into a small amount of time.
Now It’s Your Turn
What do you want to achieve in 10 years?
Can you do that in 6 months?
What if we scale that up to 30 days a year?
Can you meet these deadlines?
I am going to give it a try.
You should, as well. What is the worst that can happen?
I may miss my target, but it will still be my most productive month ever.
