Have you ever heard of Parkinson’s Law?
Tim Ferriss talks about it in his book, The Four Hour Work Week:
“Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline.
The basic idea is that if you had only 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only what is needed to get it done.
However, when you have weeks and months to get things done, you spend the bulk of the time making big what is little, and difficult what is simple.
The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus
Enter Startup Weekend
I was asked at least 10 times what #SWSLC was. Every time the answer was the same: “Awesomeness”.
Fourteen teams worked to build companies in only 54 hours.
Startup Weekend is a 54 hour event where teams combined to focus on building a web or mobile application which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend.
The hope is to bring together people with different skillsets – primarily software developers, graphics designers and business people – to build applications and develop a commercial case around them.
You can bet that Parkinson’s Law was in effect last weekend. These guys and gals worked all weekend, and stressed to build the back-end, front-end, and even consumer-end of their product ideas. One of the companies even went to the Mall, and took a consumer survey.
The polish on design and progress in code was evident in each one of the presentations. I’ve seen incubator companies that didn’t accomplish in 3 months what these teams did in 2 1/2 days. Seriously impressed.
The winners were:
1. WeShop
2. RateMyTenants
3. Unicorn Sex Appeal
You can go get a summary of the products that were created and shared at the final presentation at StartupFlavor’s blog.
