
Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill available time - pseudolus
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191107-the-law-that-explains-why-you-cant-get-anything-done
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User23
The pithy quote is just the opening sentence to the piece. The substance is
far more interesting and describes a law about the growth of bureaucracies. I
strongly recommend anyone interested to just read the whole thing, because
it's only 5 pages.

[1][https://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf](https://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf)

edit: Thanks. Fixed.

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greenyouse
Why doesn't manager A, who is manager of official A, keep track of the work
that official A does? That person could deny the unnecessary budget for more
underlings and hold official A to be accountable for their work.

I don't think these can really be called statistical proofs either. There are
some proof like axioms but it's being applied to social orders where there's
nothing very logical happening.

The original paper was published in 1955. Now that we have issue tracking
software which management can easily use to determine the efficiency of each
worker, isn't this type of bureaucratic bloat a bit harder?

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Joof
Would you consider issues to be easily measurable in terms of work required?
Given more time would you clean up those unit tests and cover some additional
cases?

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boulos
One of the modern equivalents of this is allowing a meeting to eat up the
entire time allotted, regardless of the utility. There’s something to be said
for longer, lingering discussions when you’re coming up with ideas. But for
status updates or decision-driven meetings, it seems like the meeting should
always end immediately upon the completion of the agenda.

My anecdotal sense is that a person’s reaction to abruptly ending a meeting
depends on their role and bent, similar to pg’s maker vs manager essay [1].
I’ll note that execution driven managers will happily walk out of a now
defunct meeting though, so it isn’t strictly “maker vs manager” as much as a
sense of “I don’t have something better to do currently”.

[1]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)

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Ididntdothis
In my company it’s very common that people come late to a meeting but it
almost always ends right on time, never early. I always get weird looks when I
ask “are we done?”.

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MAGZine
I do wonder how related this to to efficiency increases with shorter work
weeks.

Are we seeing a symptom of this in 40hr work weeks, where people are really
only working some value less than 40h, but they just expand their tasks?

If you reduce the workweek, is it not possible that eventually people will
adjust so that they end up day-filling the shorter day, too?

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beerandt
I see your point, but suspect it has to do with expected productivity vs
effort. As long as employers aren't seeing an overall decrease in
productivity, and as long as employees don't have a significant increase in
effort, efficiencies would make it win-win.

This of course presumes that efficiency continues to increase with advances in
methods, technology, etc.

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gdulli
I have a strategy based on the inverse of this. Sometimes there's a task that
I know I'll spend too long deliberating about, or stretching out by getting on
and off task due to procrastination. So I leave it until that last minute,
that way I can't waste time by spending more time on it than I should.

~~~
PeterStuer
The cost you will pay for this is nearly chronic stress. Also you will find
that the start of that 'last minute' tends to creep closer and closer to the
deadline as a natural consequence of you still managed to make the deadline
last time.

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hinkley
I think there may be multiple factors at play here that result in the same
outcome.

While I don't dispute his observations on organizational dynamics, I have a
theory that this behavior exists at the individual contributor level as a
result of metric dysfunction.

If you have two weeks to work on something and you get it wrong, then the ugly
question of "you had two weeks, and this is all we got?" happens. After a few
rounds of this awkward conversation we start acting defensively.

So if the problem feels pretty simple, we sense a trap that may or may not be
there. But the trick is not always obvious, and so we may take on some tech
debt payback or overengineer, only to discover that in fact there is more to
the original problem or to the additional work we volunteered for (+ sunk cost
fallacy).

So now not only has the work expanded but the work is now _late_. And _then_
that gets turned into a narrative by your boss or their boss about how we're
all terribly busy and we need more people to get the work done. And then we
are _still_ late.

~~~
perl4ever
I have found that in one environment, without the confidence of my boss, every
mistake is taken as an indication I'm stupid and incompetent. In another,
where my boss is convinced I'm very smart, if I do something badly it's taken
as strong evidence the task is very difficult. In either case, if my efforts
don't affect my bosses' view of me, then I have no pressure to do a good job.

Doing things ten times as fast as expected easily turns into an expectation of
always doing things ten times as fast, and then doing them wrong because of
being in an extreme hurry.

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ghaff
Parkinson was also just a very readable and funny writer, especially in his
original book.

He also wrote an essay--I believe in the same book--that was the origin of the
"bikeshedding" concept.

~~~
User23
You are correct. The book Parkinson's Law, or The Pursuit of Progress can be
had for around $8 used at your bookseller of choice and is a great read. The
ten essays within are:

1\. Parkinson's Law, or The Rising Pyramid

2\. The Will of the People, or Annual General Meeting

3\. High Finance, or The Point of Vanishing Interest[1]

4\. Directors and Councils, or Coefficient of Inefficiency

5\. The Short List, or Principles of Selection

6\. Plans and Plants, or The Administration Block

7\. Personality Screen, or The Cocktail Formula

8\. Injelititis, or Palsied Paralysis

9\. Palm Thatch to Packard, or A Formula for Success

10\. Pension Point, or The Age of Retirement

[1] The bicycle shed essay.

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ghaff
I actually looked for my copy. I have a couple of his later books but don't
see this one. That probably means I lent it to someone :-/

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Causality1
I'm reminded of this every time I accidentally wake up twenty minutes early
for work and end up being in more of a rush at the end than I normally am.

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boznz
the company I currently contract for had 2 administrators, a general admin
girl and a payroll lady in 2010. In 2019 it has 19 full time administrative
staff who are always busy. They still produce the same quantity of widgets and
recently sacked some production staff to reduce costs.. Go figure.

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acd
Parkinsons law was originally about an observation from the British navy. The
number of ships used by the British navy decreased but the number of
administration of the ships increased. Parkinson law can be applied to almost
any public administration. "He notes that the number employed in a bureaucracy
rose by 5–7% per year "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if
any) to be done""

Parkinsons law can also be applied to agile software engineering.

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dang
Looks like HN hasn't had a large thread on Parkinson's Law before:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22Parkinson%27s%20Law%22%20comments%3E0&sort=byDate&type=story)

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xtiansimon
> “There were fewer people and less work to manage – but management was still
> expanding, and Parkinson argued that this was due to factors that were
> independent of naval operational needs.”

The next thing I want to know after reading this passage is just what those
needs are and if they are by themselves tied to quantitative or qualitative
work products. And even within quantitative production there are issues of
quality and waste.

Simply, if you’re a cook making hamburgers to order for MacDonalds you have a
set amount of time. Your work is quantitative. If you’re making gourmet
hamburgers you can grind your own chuck, bake your own bread, make your own
condiments—hours of work. Yum.

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dghughes
I remember this law when in college taking project management. I have a
terrible habit of working until the deadline is imminent (submitting via
dropbox/email/electronically is terrible for people like me). I wasn't really
procrastinating since I started early as soon as the assignment was given. But
I would keep writing, rewriting, refining, deleting until my report was a
monster.

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WalterBright
Parkinson's books are easy reads, insightful, and quite entertaining. It's
nice to see his work get some recognition here.

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grwthckrmstr
I enjoyed this version of the article, found it to be easier to read and
filled with actionable advice you can apply in your life

[https://nesslabs.com/parkinson-law](https://nesslabs.com/parkinson-law)

(This article was published 1 day before the BBC article)

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dpc_pw
Yes, but sometimes also:
[https://vimeo.com/226508728](https://vimeo.com/226508728)

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el_don_almighty
I'm going to write something about this later when I can get to it

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golem14
I would like to recommend the “Peter principle” as well:

[https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Principle-Say-incompetence-
work...](https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Principle-Say-incompetence-
work/dp/2806269962)

If you like one, you’ll likely enjoy the other.

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golem14
oops, quoted a bogus version -- I meant this one:
[https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Principle-Things-Always-
Wrong/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Principle-Things-Always-
Wrong/dp/0062092065/)

