Parkinson's law: why we take longer the longer we have

Many readers will have noticed that it has sometimes taken them a long time to accomplish a seemingly simple task.

How can this happen? Surely it was precisely because they had a lot of time to do it. We are going to know what this curious phenomenon consists of through Parkinson's law, and what is the possible explanation behind this mechanism.

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What is Parkinson's law?

Parkinson's law is a statement by which a person who must do a task and has a certain time to do it, will always tend to occupy that time completely, no matter how much she is more than enough to complete the activity. In other words, the work to be done will be delayed to fit the full time frame available.

It is a concept developed by the author Cyril Northcote Parkinson, hence its name, in 1955. He initially coined it for an essay that he published in the weekly The Economist, but the impact was so important that he decided to publish a complete work developing this phenomenon in depth. This volume was titled Parkinson's law: The pursuit of progress. In this book, Cyril starts from 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 speaks of the case of an elderly woman, without any obligation in her day-to-day life that she occupies her time. Said woman decides at one point to write a letter for her niece. It is a seemingly simple task and also the woman, as we have said, has nothing else to do.

However, it is precisely not having other tasks to take care of and knowing that you have the day complete to write the letter which causes it to take a full day to finish the writing. How is it possible? Because you know you can afford to delay. It is a vicious circle. The person takes longer because he knows that he may take longer.

The student's example

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

The time is reasonable for the assigned task, but even so this will generate protests from many of the students, claiming that it is too little time and that they would need more to be able to do the job correctly. Suppose the teacher does not give in and the deadline is kept. Students will have three weeks. Some will start work as soon as possible and will distribute the load in that time.

Others, however, will leave it to the last minute and will spend the last days tremendously burdened as they feel that time is running out and there is still part of the work to be done. When the due date arrives, most will have completed the task, probably finalizing the last details the same day before the deadline. They will have expanded the task adjusting it to the time available, according to Parkinson's law.

But let's think now about the possibility that the teacher had yielded to the students' demands and extended the term, no less than until the end of the semester. Now the students would have four full months to do a job that could perfectly 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 when before, if only to establish the initial brush strokes. However, many would choose to postpone it indefinitely, precisely because they would know they had time to spare, as well dictated by Parkinson's law.

But time advances inexorably and, there would come a time, surely when there were less than three weeks left for delivery, which was the initial deadline, and many students would realize that they had not even started a job for which they felt they needed more than those three weeks. At that point they would begin to work piecework to be able to turn in the assignment on time.

The conclusion that we can reach with this example is that in reality the time offered to deliver the work never mattered, because the consequences were exactly the same in both assumptions: Parkinson's law made the students distribute the homework for as long as they had available, reaching the due date under certain conditions. Similar.

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Parkinson's law in bureaucracy

Another issue Cyril focused on to explain Parkinson's law was bureaucracy. According to this author, bureaucracy was another element that was constantly expanding, regardless of whether the number of tasks to be carried out 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 crew members was reduced by a third during this same period. One might think that, faced with such a decrease in resources in this particular field, the number of civil servants and bureaucrats in charge of this sector could also have been affected and therefore reduced in number, at least partly. However, the reality was very different.

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

Cyril develops Parkinson's law in these cases through two mechanisms that are the ones that would be enhancing the effect of this phenomenon in bureaucratic contexts. The first of these would refer to the constant increase in the 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 clear that the more bureaucrats there are in a system, the more procedures and paperwork they will generate towards the next lower level. In other words, there is the paradox that, with a greater number of employees, the level of work they generate and that therefore must be managed is higher.

This phenomenon has been studied at a mathematical level, concluding that if a pyramid of bureaucrats experiences continuous growth of 6%, there comes a time when it collapses, by dedicating all its resources to maintaining its own administration without being able to cope with the work to be produced.

Parkinson's laws

Although Cyril initially established the so-called Parkinson's law, the truth is that later, in the homonymous book, he relates three different laws, which are the ones that we are going to reel next.

1. Job expansion

We have already related the first of these Parkinson's laws at length. It is about the principle by which a work to be carried out is going to expand until it occupies the entire time slot that has been assigned to complete it. So, the same task can take us a week or a month to do it, assuming that it is one or the other the amount of time we have for it.

2. Expansion of expenses

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

This principle is applicable, like the previous one, both for organizations and for people.

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 spend on it. There is an inversely proportional relationship.

Bibliographic 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.