Parkinson's Law

“WORK EXPANDS SO AS TO FILL THE TIME AVAILABLE FOR ITS COMPLETION”

A person interning in a company is asked to update the facebook page of that company and is given an hour to do that. In actual, the work requires only 15 minutes. What one expects is that in one hour the person will do the work efficiently and comfortably. The end result is that the person hurriedly completes the work when 5 minutes is left. What he has been doing till now is spamming friend’s wall with notifications. And at the end of the day he complains of been over-worked from 10 to 6.

It is raining and you are asked to deposit a cheque in the bank and return in an hour. You will take an umbrella and leave. But if you are given 5 hours you will probably admire the rain and wait for it to stop and rush to the bank only at the last moment.

In both these examples, what we see is that enough ‘internal’ work is done. What I mean by internal work is the work that is not needed, avoidable and useless and which unnecessarily keeps you busy. The fact is more the time you get to complete the task, more complex the task becomes.

Think about it. DU gave us 15 days to prepare for our subsidiary papers. We worked for those 15 days. If we had 2 days we would have worked for those 2 days only. Suppose it normally takes two days to prepare our syllabus. What will happen? Some will say that in the former case we will be able to prepare well, for we get more number of days. But that’s actually not true. In the former case, you’ll work for those 15 days but the ‘real’ work done will be just 10% of the total work done. The rest is useless. In the latter case there is a deadline and in order to meet the deadline you will be more ‘focussed’. The quality of work is bound to be worse in the former than the latter because of a large number of distractions. In the former case, you might spend a few days watching movies, then a couple of days deciding how much to study in a day, then another day or two to find the syllabus and at last it will be only a day or two left when you will study somehow.  Ultimately, you yourself will realize that you could have done better with a shorter deadline. For it is 2 days or 15, people are found with the books even at the last minute.

The conclusion is Parkinson’s Law stated in another form : “ The amount of time one has to perform a task is the amount of time it will take to complete the task.”

It’s important to be clear what is meant by ‘Work expands’. When we say work we refer to the ‘real’ or actual work. ‘Work expands’ doesn’t mean the amount of ‘real’ work increases. If you are given 15 days syllabus won’t increase. But, the work increases figuratively in mind. It is human behavior to think that the work has increased. A person thinks he has worked for 8 hours in office but in actual, he has done work equivalent to 4 hours. Now consider two statements:

1.      Limit tasks to the important to shorten the work time.

2.      Shorten the work time to limit tasks to the important.

There is a great difference between the two. Take the first statement. Suppose in the earlier example, it takes 3 days normally to complete the syllabus but you are given two days. What will you do?  You will restrict yourself to the important topics so that you can do well in the subject. The idea of ‘smart work’ will be tested here. This is not Parkinson’s Law.  The second one is the Parkinson’s Law where it takes 2 days to complete the syllabus and you are given two days and if you ‘work hard’ and be ‘focussed’ for those two days you will complete the syllabus.

What I want to achieve through this is to tell the readers that ‘Delay is the deadliest form of denial.’ and to show how absurd some of our thoughts can be. I am sure most of us must have got trapped in Parkinson’s Law sometime in our lives. Don’t believe in Parkinson’s Law because it’s just a law. Parkinson’s Law doesn’t work in many situations!

So try it out! Think of a time to complete a certain task and see if you can finish the task with a better output in that time. You will be astonished to see that you are not at all over-worked!