Bike Shedding is Today’s PLOT to Manage Tri Training
The only positive outcome about wasting time in work meetings is you usually get paid for attendance. In triathlon training you never get paid so don’t waste time on mundane workouts or unimportant distractions once you get started.
Triathletes suffer from time poverty. There is never enough time in the day to swim, bike, run, eat, sleep, work, love your significant other, socialize with family/friends, and everything else in life you want to accomplish.
Let’s look at how to relieve the problem of time suck from your workouts by applying the wisdom of Cecil Northcote Parkinson who created the term, Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (PLOT), or more simply, “bike-shedding”. Mr. Parkinson was a British naval historian, author, and expert in business management. His satirical law is based on people’s behavior to spend a disproportionate amount of time on trivial issues of low monetary value and minimal complexity compared to important higher value and complicated matters.
Most non-triathletes don’t understand the nuances of Ironman events compared to a triathlon in your local park. They wouldn’t spend any time helping you make training decisions other than saying let the experts decide. To you, storing bikes should be a trivial aspect of triathloning but to an eager non-triathlete, he would discuss the subject of how best to build a bike shed to protect your equipment. He’d discuss the pros and cons of construction type, size, location, and more about the shed. The bike shedding time suck discussion would never reach the value of your lost tri training time.
Do you recognize any of your own actions of bike shedding?
Time sucking activities may lurk almost anywhere and in any form.