I once worked at a web design agency where we spent a long time honing our process. For new clients, we’d present three different initial concepts for them to choose from for what their new website would look. Each concept consisted of showing them a homepage direction and some detail page that we chose. We usually gave ourselves about a week to work on a concept.
Then I got a job at a different agency. On my first day, I met the team and onboarded to the project I’d be working on. I was assigned a concept, and I asked when it was due. Expecting the answer to be one week from that day, I was surprised to hear that it was due at the end of that day. Being the new guy and not wanting to seem incompetent, I nodded as if everything was normal. But I was freaking out inside.
It takes one week to create a concept. How could I do it in a day?
One week seemed normal at my last agency. But one day seems to be normal at this new agency.
Were we taking too long at the old place? Were we rushing at the new place? Who was right and who was wrong?
How long is it supposed to take to design, say, a landing page? Here are the answers on the first page of Google search results:
1 hour up to a week
50–75 hours
Between 4-8 hours
4-8 weeks
A few hours to a day
5 hours
1–2 weeks
1–2 days
4–6 weeks
3 hours
Not a long time
It depends
Usually, the “it depends” answers aren’t very helpful and the specific answers are. But, in this case, the specific answers are so varied that they’re even more confusing.
What would you do in this scenario? What did I do?
I sat down to work. I tried not to show it, but I was working furiously. I somehow had to fit what I was used to spending a week on into just a few hours.
I actually got it done, and not in some “cut-every-corner,” “phone-in-your-worst-design” kind of way. I liked what I had done. I was proud of it, and proud to show it to the client.
So… had I been wasting weeks for the last few years at my previous agency?
Without realizing it, I learned about Parkinson’s law that day. It says:
Work expands to fill its allotted time span.
And more specifically, the Horstman corollary to Parkinson’s law:
Work contracts to fit in the time we give it.
How long does it take to design a landing page? When I had a week to do it, it took a week. When I had a day to do it, it took a day.
That moment happened to me 14 years ago. I’ve designed many landing pages since then. Looking back at old timesheets, here’s how long it’s taken me to design landing pages before:
1 hour
1 day
A few days
1 week
4 weeks
3 months
6 months
Now I see how that page of Google search results makes sense. It’s not that any particular answer is true. It’s that any of the answers can be true.
Certainly, you could argue that makes sense because every landing page is different. Some have different features and content, stakeholders, timelines, budgets, etc.
Which is true. But that’s not the reason it takes different amounts of time. It takes different amounts of time because we give it different amounts of time.
I used to think that the different variables of a project meant I had to make my process different. But I learned that, instead of changing my process, I could change my mind.
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