Here's How Work Expands to Fill the Time Available to Complete It
7 audacious tips on how to leverage Parkinson’s Law to turbocharge productivity and wellbeing
In 1955 British naval historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson published in The Economist an article about bloated government bureaucracies, stating:
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
He dubbed this Parkinson’s Law. You likely have heard the idea, if not the name. It’s been immortalized as a workplace axiom and the subject of countless quasi-scientific experiments (summarized in the BBC article The ‘Law’ That Explains Why You Can’t Get Anything Done).
Unfortunately, Parkinson’s Law is commonly misinterpreted, as exemplified by the BBC headline, to be an assertion about procrastination and personal ineffectiveness. It’s nothing of the sort.
Just Kidding?
Devoted followers often fail to note that old Parky was a jokester. He originally drafted his Economist article with thoughts of submitting it to British humor magazine Punch. Here’s a soundbite of him saying as much:
“It was unserious in form, and it might have been sent to a humorous magazine. Instead, and I think more wisely, I sent it to the London Economist.” — from the album Prof. C. Northcote Parkinson Explains Parkinson’s Law
While his tongue may be firmly planted in his cheek, Parkinson is making a point he deems valid.
The article is about agencies bursting at the seams with civil service officials — comparable, in the context of our information age, to top-heavy organizations in knowledge-based industries like software development, public relations, and human resources, as well as public sector entities.
But Parkinson neglectfully opens his article with an anecdote that has nothing to do with organizations or work environments:
An elderly lady of leisure can spend an entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece... An hour will be spent finding the postcard, another hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street.
Parkinson isn’t describing procrastination per se. His “elderly lady” dawdles, but not to avoid an unsatisfying task. Either way, Parkinson immediately digresses from the topic of individual behavior, never to return and connect task performance to his theme.
Ironically, the anecdote exhibits Parkinson’s own literary dawdling, forestalling his main point and serving no purpose except perhaps to entice readers with a cheap shot at old women. (The next sentence in his anecdote leads with, “The total effort… would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told…”)
Yet, with his irrelevant example, Parkinson sows in our collective consciousness the seed of a connection between work expansion and worker inefficiency.
Yearning for Purpose
Parkinson’s real point is unbridled growth of organizations, which he attributes to two behaviors common to managers:
Seeking to “multiply subordinates”
Creating unnecessary work for other managers.
We can infer that the work managers generate ultimately is delegated to rank-and-file workers.
Parkinson states…
The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson's Law, and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish or even disappear…
He devises a mock formula…
With his elderly lady scenario, however, Parkinson inadvertently perpetuates the time-honored practice of blaming workers for organizations’ systemic dysfunction.
(“Inadvertently,” because Parkinson doesn’t impugn individual workers. Summarizing another anecdote in which a document is circulated through several tiers of unnecessary revisions and approvals, for example, he concludes, “Far more people have taken far longer to produce the same result. No one has been idle. All have done their best.”)
What’s more, he fails to note that proliferation of unnecessary jobs leaves job holders yearning for purpose. I believe this is what
refers to in his stellar book The End of Burnout:Even while work is expanding and intensifying, there is also evidence that it is becoming more trivial and pointless, forcing workers to spend time and energy on tasks that don’t matter. Much of what people do at work is mere administrative “box-ticking…”
Seven Audacious Tips on How to Leverage Parkinson’s Law to Turbocharge Productivity and Boost Employee Wellbeing
Most articles about Parkinson’s Law are accompanied by dimwitted but marketable advice taking aim at the behavior of individuals, like “Motivate employees with tight, enforceable deadlines.” Similarly, personal productivity hustlers sell content exhorting us to “fight Parkinson’s Law” and “crush it at work” with radical tactics like setting goals and waking up earlier.
I’m loathe to distill anything in working life into easy steps. But I’m compelled to counter others’ myopic takeaways. Based on Parkinson’s article, which states not that employees are slackers, but that “work is elastic in its demands on time,” here are seven tips for leaders:
Shorten the workweek (ideally, accompanied by universal healthcare, overtime regulation, and a minimum wage of at least $25 per hour, all necessary to protect the wellbeing of lower wage workers).
Grant paid family leave of at least 18 weeks, the amount of maternity leave recommended by the International Labor Organization and already available to workers in at least 52 countries. Because work is elastic, at year-end knowledge workers will produce the same output regardless of whether they have eight weeks or 18 weeks off.
Provide at least four weeks annual vacation.
HR and wellness professionals: Be mindful of your tingling spidey sense when vendors promise savings from reduced presenteeism and absenteeism. Methods of converting these rates to payroll savings were shown in 2007 to be unvalidated and haven’t been improved since, especially for knowledge workers whose productivity is hard to measure.
Offer paid sabbatical of 12 weeks for every five years worked.
Don’t over-hire and then lay workers off. (See my post Layoff Notices: What They Say Vs. What They Really Mean and the Wharton article How Layoffs Hurt Companies.)
Stop claiming that remote employees are working fewer hours and, consequently, reducing productivity. Time and output, according to Parkinson’s Law, are distinct metrics. Workers can fold laundry, walk Fido, raid the fridge, and retrieve little Liam and Olivia from daycare without hindering productivity.
Parkinson’s Law may have some validity. But the fact that light-hearted satire has been ingrained into management doctrine, twisted to mischaracterize workers, tells us more about business than Parkinson ever did.
Addendum: Heigh Ho is committed to all workers — including those in food service, retail, transportation, agriculture, mining, and construction, where Parkinson’s Law has little relevance. Work doesn’t expand to fill time on a factory production line, in a field where crops are ripening, or at the ICU nurses’ station.
If you work at a non-desk job and want to share anything related to working life, leave a voice message here.
Announcement: Heigh Ho-bot Takes a Leave of Absence
A couple of months ago, I introduced Heigh Ho-bot, the AI chatbot trained exclusively on Heigh Ho posts. The bot will take a leave of absence effective December 7, 2023. An improved version will return to action in 2024.
New York Times Gift Articles
(No paywall through December 11, 2023, compliments of Heigh Ho)
A Few of the Ideas About How to Fix Human Behavior Rest on Some Pretty Shaky Science — The field of behavioral economics has shaped policies we encounter every day. But the science behind it is crumbling.
Two Years With America’s Elite Firefighters — Hotshot fire crews work on the front lines of the biggest wildfires in the American West. We [NYT] rode with them.
The Truth About Sleep Trackers — Their technology is impressive, but imperfect. Can they really help you get a better night’s rest?
The Pension: That Rare Retirement Benefit Gets a Fresh Look — As the downsides of 401(k)-style plans become apparent, workers and some companies, including IBM, show new interest in defined benefit plans.
Miss Jane Marple might have something to say about the value of elderly women, but I would humbly like to add #8 - band together as employers for universal health coverage and start gathering the necessary momentum to make it happen. The latest from KFF states that small businesses can no longer find or offer affordable insurance plans nor can their employees afford them.