Parkinson’s Law

Author: Torgeir Páll Gíslason

Parkinson's Law is as defined by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in 19955: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". That is, work takes as long as the time it's given. People plan according to how much time they have and how close it is to the deadline. When it comes closer to the deadline, people have to start making "choices" and "tradeoffs" as they must accomplish the assignment by the deadline. In recent years this law has been studied to try to make workers and students more efficient and waste as little time as possible. For example, Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA put forth a theory about it as he said "If you split your day into ten-minute increments, and you try to waste as few of those ten minute increments as possible, you will be amazed at what you can get done". Many more scholars have theories on the topic

History

Origin Parkinson's Law was first coined by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in "The Economist", in a humorous essay he wrote in for it in 1955. In the essay he shares a story of a woman whose only task in a is to send a postcard, a task that takes a busy person around three minutes to do. This woman however spends an hour to find the card, half an hour to look for her glasses, an hour and a half writing the card, twenty minutes to decide if she should take an umbrella to walk to the mailbox and so on until it has taken her the entire day.

Author Cyril Northcote Parkinson, Often referred to as C. Northcote Parkinson, was born July 30, 1909 in Durham England and died March 9, 1993. He was a British historian and an author. He received a Ph.D in history from Kings College, London, in 1935. After which he toucht at multiple schools in England, along with teaching in Malaya, now Mlaysia, from 1950 to 1958. His comments regarding the nature of bureaucracy are based on his experiences as a British army staff officer during the second World War. He said that, Administrators work for each other so they can multiply the number of subordinates and enhance their prestige.

Practice

Implementation

Using Parkinson's Law to your advantage

The formula

{\displaystyle x={\frac {2k^{m}+P}{n}}} x – number of new employees to be hired annually k – number of employees who want to be promoted by hiring new employees m – number of working hours per person for the preparation of internal memoranda (micropolitics) P – difference: age at hiring − age at retirement n – number of administrative files actually completed

References

https://personalmba.com/parkinsons-law/ https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/what-is-parkinsons-law https://www.wealest.com/articles/parkinsons-law