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 for it in 1955. In the essay he shares a story of a woman whose only task in a day 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 taught at multiple schools in England, along with teaching in Malaya, now Malaysia, 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 In real life situations, when given more time then would under normal circumstances be needed to finish the project, the project expands in scope. As in the example given by by C. Northcote Parkinson, every aspect of the project can take longer but the project can also grow into a larger project. Often times when project grows in scope while it is ongoing it can useful in the long run but it often does not bring you closer to completing the original project. For example think of a team that is given two weeks to fix a bug that normally takes a few hours to fix. As they have more then enough time to fix the bug they start looking into some related issues that they can use the time to fix. While they are looking into those issues they start looking for the root cause of the issues. Now even though fixing those issues can be useful in the long run, it does not bring the team closer to fixing the original bug, and thous the project has expended as only to use the whole two weeks.

Procrastination Apart from the project expanding and becoming more complex, Procrastination is also a large part of Parkinson's Law. When people know that they have enough time to finish a project, it can motivate them to leave the work undone until the last minute. These delays in starting the work means that the time required to do the project expands. This happens because approaching deadlines can be motivating. The Yerkes-Dodson Law states that there exists a relationship between arousal and behavioral task performance. Therefore there is an optimal level of arousal for optimal performance. So as the deadline approaches it can work as the arousal needed for optimal performance.

Parkinson's Law of Triviality Parkinson's Law is often thought of in regard of individual productivity, but another dimension of it is in group settings. Parkinson's Law of Triviality is the act of time wasting on non essential details of a project, while more important matters are not attended to. This is also known as bikeshedding. The term bikeshedding comes from C. Northcote Parkinson's observation on a team tasked with approving plans for a nuclear power plant. Parkinson observed that the team spent a lot of time on relatively unimportant aspects of the project, notably the bicycle storage shed, leaving less time to design the nuclear plant. Parkinson's Law of Triviality is also associated with social loafing, that is that people tend to put in less effort when working in groups then they would if they were working alone.

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 https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-0-387-79948-3_1340