Parkinson's Law

Parkinson’s Law says that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Cyril Northcote Parkinson set it out in The Economist in 1955, writing about the growth of administrative departments; his observation was that the number of officials had very little to do with the volume of work. A task given a week tends to take a week; given an afternoon, it is often finished by five to the same standard.

What is happening

Work without a hard edge attracts extra care, extra checking, extra consultation and extra thinking about starting. A proposal that needs three hours, given five days, gets opened on Tuesday, thought about on Wednesday, half-written on Thursday and finished on Friday afternoon under precisely the pressure that would have finished it on Tuesday.

Parkinson wrote a second version that applies as directly to owners: expenditure rises to meet income. Costs behave like tasks. Give the business more revenue and the overhead will find a way to occupy it, in a series of steps that each look individually reasonable at the time.

Why it matters when you own the business

Most of your team’s deadlines come from you, including the ones you never set.

Anything described as ongoing is running on Parkinson’s Law, as is anything nearly finished for a fortnight and every meeting that runs to the calendar slot rather than to the agenda.

The commercial point is that the expansion never appears as a cost anywhere. It appears as capacity you think you do not have, as a hiring conversation you should not be having yet, and as strategic work you cannot fit in.

Why the container has to be external

Work compresses when someone else holds the deadline, because a deadline you can quietly move does not hold.

That is why the week before a holiday is so productive: the deadline cannot move, so the re-reading, checking and waiting to feel ready drop away.

You can manufacture the same effect deliberately. Tell a customer the proposal will be with them by four rather than later this week. Ask your accountant to book the review meeting for day four of the month, so the accounts have to exist by then. Book the client presentation before the deck is written.

An external deadline on work you do not control produces stress rather than compression, so put the deadline on the part you own.

How to use it

Price one recurring meeting, then halve it

Take the meeting everybody privately finds long. Multiply its length in hours by the number of people in the room, by their loaded hourly cost, by the number of weeks a year it runs. Then cut the slot in half, publish an agenda with times against each item, and start on the minute. Give it four weeks before you judge it.

Give every task a deadline and a duration

“Friday” is a deadline. “Friday, and it should take two hours” is a container.

Define done before you start

Write the standard down first: three pages, three options, no rewriting the boilerplate.

Book a hard stop

Put something immovable immediately after the work. Use a call, a school run or leaving the building.

Set a time budget on the next proposal

Decide the hours before you open the document and write them at the top.

Apply it to money once a quarter

Set overheads as a percentage of turnover rather than as last year plus a bit.

Common mistakes

The first mistake is shrinking other people’s containers without changing the scope or the standard and calling it efficiency. That produces either overtime nobody logs or corners cut that you find out about later.

Cutting the time only works if you also say what gets dropped, and you have to be the one to say it. “The meeting is 45 minutes now” is a compression. “The meeting is 45 minutes, updates go in writing beforehand, and we only discuss things that need a decision” is a redesign.

The other mistake is applying it to work whose quality scales with thinking time. Examples are a pricing model, a first draft of the strategy and a difficult recruitment decision. Squeeze those and you get a fast bad answer. Parkinson’s Law applies to work with a definable finish.

Questions to ask yourself

• Out of 10, how much of last week’s work had a real container on it, rather than a vague direction?
• Which recurring meeting would lose nothing at half the length, and what is stopping you halving it this week?
• What has been nearly finished for more than a fortnight, and how many hours of real work are left in it?
• If your turnover grew by a fifth next year, what would stop the overhead growing with it?

This sits inside the time and owner freedom work in Personal Coaching. The Performance Zone is the necessary counterweight, because a container set too tight for too long stops producing compression and starts producing mistakes — and The Planning Hierarchy is what stops you compressing the wrong work brilliantly.