Have you ever noticed that a report due in a week takes a week, while the same report somehow gets done in three days when the deadline is three days away? The phenomenon in which work, far from shrinking when there is plenty of time, actually grows to fill that time is familiar to office workers and students alike. The sharp one-line summary of this familiar experience is Parkinson's Law.
Put simply, Parkinson's Law is the observation that ‘work expands to fill the time given to complete it.’ It was first put forward by the British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson in a satirical essay published in 1955 in the British weekly The Economist, and it became known around the world when it was collected in a 1957 book of the same name.
This article explains, in easy-to-understand terms, what Parkinson's Law means and how it came about, why bureaucracies grow, the Law of Triviality and the Second Law that are known alongside it, and how to turn the law to your advantage in everyday life.
How Parkinson's Law Works and How to Use It
What Is Parkinson's Law?
Parkinson opens his essay with an example. An elderly lady with almost nothing to do spends an entire day sending a single postcard to her niece. An hour goes into choosing the postcard, an hour into looking for her glasses, half an hour into finding the address, and a little over an hour into polishing the wording. A task that a busy person would finish in a few minutes becomes a full day's work for someone with time to spare.
The key sentence drawn from this observation is “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” It means that the amount of work is not fixed from the start but stretches and shrinks like a rubber band depending on the time and slack available.
- Time expansion: When the deadline is far off, side tasks such as preparing, checking, and revising multiply endlessly.
- Rising standards: When there is slack, the bar for ‘good enough’ keeps rising.
- Procrastination: When we feel there is plenty of time left, we put off starting and then cram everything in just before the deadline.
The important point is that the law is not a reproach for laziness; it is an observation that pokes at the tendency of people and organizations to inflate their work to match the resources they are given.
Why Do Bureaucracies Keep Growing?
In fact, the main target of Parkinson's essay was not personal time management but bureaucracy. He argued that the number of officials grows steadily year after year regardless of the amount of work, and he explained why with two principles.
(1) The multiplication of subordinates
A manager who feels overworked would rather take on two subordinates under him than bring in a colleague who could become a rival. With only one subordinate, that person might covet his position; with two, they keep each other in check and the manager's status rises.
(2) The mutual creation of work
As the number of people grows, they create work for one another. Approvals, reports, meetings, and coordination of opinions multiply, and everyone is busy, but much of that work is internal and unrelated to results outside the organization.
As supporting evidence, Parkinson cited statistics from the British Admiralty. Between 1914 and 1928, the number of capital ships fell by about 67% and the number of naval officers and men by about 31%, yet the administrative staff at Admiralty headquarters actually grew by about 78%. He also pointed out that the staff of the British Colonial Office increased even as the number of colonies it had to manage declined.
The Law of Triviality and Parkinson's Second Law
Parkinson's book also contains another observation that is still often quoted today: the Law of Triviality. It states that the time a meeting spends on an agenda item tends to be in inverse proportion to the sum of money or importance involved.
Parkinson's example goes like this. A committee approves a £10 million plan to build a nuclear reactor in a few minutes, because most of its members know little about the subject. But on an item about building a bicycle shed for the staff, everyone can have an opinion, so a lengthy debate breaks out over the roofing material and the cost. This story gave rise to the term ‘bikeshedding’ for pointless debate, which is now widely used among software developers as well.
In his 1960 book The Law and the Profits, Parkinson also put forward what is known as his Second Law: ‘expenditure rises to meet income.’ The common experience of spending more as soon as your salary goes up, rather than saving the difference, shows that not only time but money, too, fills whatever is available.
Criticisms, Limitations, and How to Turn It to Your Advantage
Parkinson's Law is closer to satire and sharp observation than to a rigorous scientific law. Critics note that the Admiralty statistics are also mixed up with other factors of the time, such as disarmament treaties, technological change, and the growing complexity of managing ships, so it is hard to attribute the entire increase in staff to bureaucratic self-interest. There are also clearly cases where having ample time genuinely improves the quality of work.
Even so, the law serves as a useful warning when dealing with time and resources. Here is how you can turn it to your advantage in everyday life.
(1) Move your deadlines forward yourself
Setting a personal deadline earlier than the real one leaves less room for work to balloon unnecessarily.
(2) Set time boxes
Timeboxing, which sets a time limit for each task, such as ‘I'll spend only 30 minutes on this,’ is a classic way of using Parkinson's Law in reverse.
(3) Weight your meeting agenda
Dealing with important items first and putting time limits on trivial ones can reduce bikeshedding.
Parkinson's Law wittily points out that work and organizations swell on their own until they fill the time and resources they are given. Ample time is a blessing, but unless you set boundaries, that time is soon filled with unnecessary work.
The habit of drawing boundaries around the work that needs to be done rather than around the time you are given: that is the first step in time management.
