According to LessWrong, productivity strategist Ben Pace has developed what he calls Parkinson's Heuristic: the optimal time to work on something is when you barely have enough time to do it. He builds on Parkinson's Law—work expands to fill available time—and inverts it: give yourself less time, get more done. Pace illustrates this with his own workflow. He clears his email inbox fastest when drowning in messages, designs event websites just before launch, and organized a major conference in one month instead of three when another project ended, forcing compression. When there's no deadline, he procrastinates. When there is one, he optimizes ruthlessly. The counterintuitive payoff: most work done before a deadline isn't worth doing anyway. By compressing the timeline, he cuts the excess and ships something that works. The catch? This only applies to work. On vacation or free time, the heuristic breaks down entirely.

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