Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill available time

The pithy quote is just the opening sentence to the piece. The substance is far more interesting and describes a law about the growth of bureaucracies. I strongly recommend anyone interested to just read the whole thing, because it's only 5 pages.

[1]https://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf

edit: Thanks. Fixed.

One of the modern equivalents of this is allowing a meeting to eat up the entire time allotted, regardless of the utility. There’s something to be said for longer, lingering discussions when you’re coming up with ideas. But for status updates or decision-driven meetings, it seems like the meeting should always end immediately upon the completion of the agenda.

My anecdotal sense is that a person’s reaction to abruptly ending a meeting depends on their role and bent, similar to pg’s maker vs manager essay [1]. I’ll note that execution driven managers will happily walk out of a now defunct meeting though, so it isn’t strictly “maker vs manager” as much as a sense of “I don’t have something better to do currently”.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I do wonder how related this to to efficiency increases with shorter work weeks.

Are we seeing a symptom of this in 40hr work weeks, where people are really only working some value less than 40h, but they just expand their tasks?

If you reduce the workweek, is it not possible that eventually people will adjust so that they end up day-filling the shorter day, too?

I have a strategy based on the inverse of this. Sometimes there's a task that I know I'll spend too long deliberating about, or stretching out by getting on and off task due to procrastination. So I leave it until that last minute, that way I can't waste time by spending more time on it than I should.

I think there may be multiple factors at play here that result in the same outcome.

While I don't dispute his observations on organizational dynamics, I have a theory that this behavior exists at the individual contributor level as a result of metric dysfunction.

If you have two weeks to work on something and you get it wrong, then the ugly question of "you had two weeks, and this is all we got?" happens. After a few rounds of this awkward conversation we start acting defensively.

So if the problem feels pretty simple, we sense a trap that may or may not be there. But the trick is not always obvious, and so we may take on some tech debt payback or overengineer, only to discover that in fact there is more to the original problem or to the additional work we volunteered for (+ sunk cost fallacy).

So now not only has the work expanded but the work is now late. And then that gets turned into a narrative by your boss or their boss about how we're all terribly busy and we need more people to get the work done. And then we are still late.

Parkinson was also just a very readable and funny writer, especially in his original book.

He also wrote an essay--I believe in the same book--that was the origin of the "bikeshedding" concept.

I'm reminded of this every time I accidentally wake up twenty minutes early for work and end up being in more of a rush at the end than I normally am.

the company I currently contract for had 2 administrators, a general admin girl and a payroll lady in 2010. In 2019 it has 19 full time administrative staff who are always busy. They still produce the same quantity of widgets and recently sacked some production staff to reduce costs.. Go figure.

Parkinsons law was originally about an observation from the British navy. The number of ships used by the British navy decreased but the number of administration of the ships increased. Parkinson law can be applied to almost any public administration. "He notes that the number employed in a bureaucracy rose by 5–7% per year "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done""

Parkinsons law can also be applied to agile software engineering.

Looks like HN hasn't had a large thread on Parkinson's Law before: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> “There were fewer people and less work to manage – but management was still expanding, and Parkinson argued that this was due to factors that were independent of naval operational needs.”

The next thing I want to know after reading this passage is just what those needs are and if they are by themselves tied to quantitative or qualitative work products. And even within quantitative production there are issues of quality and waste.

Simply, if you’re a cook making hamburgers to order for MacDonalds you have a set amount of time. Your work is quantitative. If you’re making gourmet hamburgers you can grind your own chuck, bake your own bread, make your own condiments—hours of work. Yum.

I remember this law when in college taking project management. I have a terrible habit of working until the deadline is imminent (submitting via dropbox/email/electronically is terrible for people like me). I wasn't really procrastinating since I started early as soon as the assignment was given. But I would keep writing, rewriting, refining, deleting until my report was a monster.

Parkinson's books are easy reads, insightful, and quite entertaining. It's nice to see his work get some recognition here.

I enjoyed this version of the article, found it to be easier to read and filled with actionable advice you can apply in your life

https://nesslabs.com/parkinson-law

(This article was published 1 day before the BBC article)

Yes, but sometimes also: https://vimeo.com/226508728

I'm going to write something about this later when I can get to it

I would like to recommend the “Peter principle” as well:

https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Principle-Say-incompetence-work...

If you like one, you’ll likely enjoy the other.