Parkinson’s Law Explained: How Work Expands With Time

An impetuous over-commitment made at work.

A few weeks ago, my boss who is the Director of the Research & Quality Department at my College urgently requested me to submit the Student Cohort Analysis report for the major programs that are offered there. Even though the report submission wasn’t due by then, he needed it to be submitted to the new top management that took over the college recently. As the report wasn’t made, I told him that I have to work on it & in my reluctance to give a bad impression, I overcommitted to him by promising to do it the next day. Minutes later I was back into my conscious gritting my teeth in preparation for the demanding work that lay ahead of me.

This report examined the progression of the college’s 20 Majors’ previous five student cohorts. It has about 150 pages and was due by the end of the academic year, which is still two months away. Owing to the urgency & need, I have no other option but to face the challenge. I began working on the report the next day and pushed myself to work from 9:00 a.m till 4:00 p.m in full flow and without interruptions, which Cal Newport refers to as Deep Work.

The report was just halfway finished at that point. As I became exhausted, I took a few hours off to unwind and re-energize. I returned to work at about 9:00 p.m and finished the report despite my lack of sleep that night. I breathed a sigh of relief when I submitted the report to my boss. I completed a task that I had originally given myself two months to complete in a single day. This was my first encounter with Parkinson’s Law.

Parkinson’s Law states that work will always expand to fill the time we allocate to it.

Though I was aware of this phenomenon as I came across it in some of the productivity books I read, this was my first conscious experience with it.

Work expands to fill time available for its completion

Parkinson’s law states that if someone is given a week to complete a task that should take them a day to finish, they will often end up unnecessarily stretching out the task so that it will take them the whole week to complete it.

This term was first referred to by C. Northcote Parkinson, a British naval historian best known for his best-seller book ‘Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress’ (1957). During his time at British Civil Services, he observed that the number of administrators within the organization tends to increase regardless of the amount of work done.

Though Parkinson’s law is primarily concerned with the time it takes to accomplish tasks, the basic premise may be applied to domains other than time management and personal productivity. Thus a more generalized form of Parkinson’s law is that the “task expands to absorb the resources available for its completion.” This essentially indicates that once resources, like time, money, and effort, are made accessible for a certain purpose, individuals prefer to use them all up, even when they are superfluous. This concept described by Parkinson’s law can be observed by ourselves in our daily lives & has been a subject of discussion in various scientific studies related to productivity & human behavior.

How to account for Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law is an observation, not magic. It works because people give tasks longer time than they really need, not because they want some “leg room” or buffer, but usually because they have an inflated idea of how long the task takes to complete. Couple it with the tendency of people to procrastinate & give into several distractions.

Running Against the Clock

1. Make a list of tasks, divide them up by the amount of time it takes to complete them, and give yourself half that time to complete each task. When doing so, you should not focus on how much time is available to finish the work but rather focus on how long it should genuinely take to complete it.

2. Treat the time limit as crucial, and strive to beat it as if it were your opponent.

Get Better at Judging Time

1. Avoid planning fallacy. If giving excess time than the required leads to the phenomenon described in Parkinson’s law, then the reverse leads to a prediction phenomenon called Planning Fallacy wherein people underestimate the amount of time it will take to perform a future activity while knowing that prior assignments have often taken longer than intended.

2. Set artificial deadlines beyond the original. For example, if work may potentially be completed by the end of next month, but you know it can be accomplished in a matter of days, then set a deadline for yourself to complete the assignment within that period.

Crush the Cockroaches of the Productivity World

1. Look for those little time-fillers, like email and feed reading, that you might usually take ten or twenty minutes. Give yourself just five minutes to do these tasks, and don’t give them more attention until you’ve completed everything on your to-do list. Switch yourself to Deep Work mode rather than Shallow work as explained by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work.

2. Be “indistractable”. Master your internal triggers & tame the external triggers towards distraction.

In the future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others and those who proudly call themselves “indistractable.” Nir, Eyal, Indistractable.

Learn to Prioritize

1. 20% of what you do is essential, which will account for 80% of your results. This is known as Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule. Hence identify & focus on the vital 20%.

2. Another very effective method for prioritizing is the Eisenhower Matrix, also known as Urgent-Important Matrix. It helps you to categorize and prioritize tasks by urgency and importance, sorting out less urgent and less important tasks which you should either delegate or not do at all.

Conclusion

By assigning the right amount of time to a task, you gain back more time, and the task reduces in complexity to its natural state. Knowing Parkinson’s law can help you avoid falling into productivity traps, and help you stay on schedule in areas of your life.

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