Parkinson’s law: why we take longer the more time we have

Parkinson's Law shows us how avoidable time management problems are.

Many readers will have noticed that at times it has taken them a long time to complete a seemingly simple task.

How is this possible? It was probably precisely because they had a lot of time to do it. Let's find out what this curious phenomenon consists of through Parkinson's Lawand what is the possible explanation that is hidden under this mechanism.

What is Parkinson's law?

Parkinson's law is a statement by which a person who has to do a task and has a certain amount of time to do it, will always tend to occupy that time completely.However, there is more than enough time to complete the activity. In other words, the work to be done will be dilated to fit the available time frame completely.

This is a concept developed by the author Cyril Northcote Parkinson, hence its name, in 1955.. He coined it initially for an essay he published in the weekly magazine The Economist, but the impact was so important that he decided to publish a complete work developing this phenomenon in depth. This volume was entitled Parkinson's law: The pursuit of progress. In this book, Cyril draws on his own experience as a member of the British civil service.

One of the examples with which the author tries to illustrate Parkinson's law is the case of an elderly woman with no day-to-day obligations to occupy her time. She decides at one point to write a letter to her niece. This is a seemingly simple task and besides, the woman, as we have said, has nothing else to do.

However, it is precisely the fact that she has no other tasks to take care of and the knowledge that she has the whole day to write the letter that causes her to take the whole day to finish writing it. How is this possible? Because he knows he can afford to be late. It's a vicious cycle. The person takes longer because he knows he can take longer..

The example of the student

The above example perfectly visualizes the essence of Parkinson's law, but it is a phenomenon that can be easily observed in many projects within a company and, of course, in the experts of this law: the students, at least some of them. It is common for a situation similar to the following to occur. A professor commissions a research paper to his students and gives them a deadline of three weeks.

The time is reasonable for the task at hand, but it will still generate protests from many of the students, claiming that it is too little time and that they would need more to do the work properly.The time is reasonable for the assignment, but this will still generate protests from many students, claiming that it is too little time and that they would need more time to do the work properly. Suppose the teacher does not give in and the deadline is kept. The students will have three weeks. Some will start work as soon as possible and spread the load over that time.

Others, however, will leave it to the last minute and spend the last few days tremendously overwhelmed as they feel that time is running out and there is still some work to be done. By the time the deadline arrives, most will have managed to complete the task, most likely finalizing the last details the day before the deadline. They will have expanded the task by adjusting it to the time available.according to Parkinson's Law.

But let us now consider the possibility that the professor had given in to the students' demands and extended the deadline to the end of the term, no less. Now the students would have a full four months to complete an assignment that could easily be done in three weeks, as we have already seen. What would happen?

Some students, as in the other case, could begin to do the work as soon as possible, even if only to establish the initial strokes. However, many would choose to postpone it, many would choose to postpone it indefinitely, precisely because they would know that they had plenty of timeas Parkinson's law dictates.

But time marches on inexorably, and there would come a time, probably when there were less than three weeks left to turn in, which was the initial deadline, and many students would realize that they had not even started on an assignment for which they felt they needed more than those three weeks. At that point they would begin to work their tails off in order to deliver the assignment on time.

The conclusion we can reach with this example is that in reality the deadline offered to deliver the work never mattered, because the consequences were exactly the same in both scenarios: Parkinson's law made the students spread the task over the entire time they had available, arriving at the due date in similar conditions.

Parkinson's law in the bureaucracy.

Another issue that Cyril focused on to explain his Parkinson's Law was that of bureaucracy. According to this author, bureaucracy was another element that was constantly being dilated, regardless of whether the number of tasks to be performed was maintained or even reduced..

To explain this phenomenon he gave an example of a real case that he himself had observed during his research work as a naval historian. Parkinson realized that the British navy, in just a decade and a half since 1914, had lost a total of two thirds of its entire fleet.

Likewise, the number of crewmen was reduced by one-third during this same period. One would think that, in the face of such a decline in the resources of this particular field, the number of officers and bureaucrats in charge of this sector might equally have been affected and thus reduced in number, at least in part. However, the reality was very different.

Not only had the number of bureaucrats in charge of the affairs of the British navy not been reduced, but more had been hired, namely by an increase of 6% in each of the years in which this process was studied.How is it possible that, in the face of such a dramatic decrease in the fleet and the corresponding crew, administrative tasks not only did not decrease but increased?

Cyril develops Parkinson's law in these cases through two mechanisms that would be enhancing the effect of this phenomenon in bureaucratic contexts. The first of these would refer to the constant increase in the number of subordinates of each bureaucrat. The second principle is a consequence of the first and refers to the amount of work that some bureaucrats generate for others.

It is evident that the more bureaucrats there are in a system, the more paperwork and paperwork they will generate to the next lower level. In other words, there is the paradox that, with more employees, the level of work they generate and therefore need to manage is greater.

This phenomenon has been studied at a mathematical level, reaching the conclusion that if a pyramid of bureaucrats undergoes a continuous growth of 6%, there comes a time when it collapsesIt is not possible to keep up with the work to be produced if all its resources are devoted to the maintenance of its own administration.

Parkinson's laws

Although Cyril initially established the so-called Parkinson's law, the truth is that later, in the book of the same name, he later, in the book of the same name, he describes three different laws, which are the ones we are going to describe.which are the ones we are going to describe below.

1. Expansion of work

The first of these Parkinson's laws has already been described at length. It is the principle whereby a job to be done will expand until it occupies the entire time allotted for its completion. That is why, the same task can take us a week or a month to complete, assuming that it is one or the other the amount of time we have available for it..

2. Expansion of expenses

But Parkinson's law is not only limited to work. It can also be applied to expenses. In this sense, we would observe that the expenses that a given entity has will grow until it has completely covered the amount of income it has available.. Therefore, if we had more income, we would probably generate more expenses immediately afterwards.

This principle is applicable, just as the previous one, to organizations as well as to individuals.

3. Less relevance, more time

Finally, in Parkinson's law we observe another curious phenomenon, and that is that we tend to spend more time on a task, the more irrelevant it is. Therefore, the more relevant the task, the less time we will spend on it. There is an inversely proportional relationship.

Bibliographical references:

• Gutierrez, G.J., Kouvelis, P. (1991). Parkinson's law and its implications for project management. Management Science.
• Parkinson, C. (1955). Parkinson's Law. The Economist. London.
• Parkinson, C., Osborn, R.C. (1957). Parkinson's Law, and Other Studies in Administration. Houghton Mifflin.
• Parkinson, C. (2002). Parkinson's Law, or The Pursuit of Progress. Penguin Modern Classics.