Parkinson’s Law: Why It Takes Us Longer The More Time We Have
Many readers will have noticed that sometimes it has taken them a long time to complete a seemingly simple task.
How is this possible? Surely it was precisely because they had a lot of time to do it. Let’s learn what this curious phenomenon consists of through Parkinson’s law and what is the possible explanation hidden behind said mechanism.
Parkinson’s law is a statement by which A person who must do a task and has a certain amount of time to do it will always tend to completely occupy said time , even if it is more than enough to complete the activity. In other words, the work to be done will be expanded to fit the entire time frame available.
It is a concept developed by the author Cyril Northcote Parkinson, hence its name, in 1955 She 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 daily life that takes up her time. Said woman decides at one point to write a letter for her niece. It is an apparently simple task and 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 entire day to write the letter that causes it to take you the entire day to finish writing. How is it possible? Because he knows he can afford to delay. It is a vicious circle. The person takes longer because they know it can take longer
The student example
The previous 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: students, at least some of them. It is common for a situation similar to the following to occur. A professor assigns a research project to his students and gives them a deadline of three weeks.
The time is reasonable for the task assigned, but this will still 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 maintained. Students will have three weeks. Some will start working as soon as possible and distribute the load during that time.
Others, however, will leave it until the last minute and will spend the last few days tremendously overwhelmed as they feel that time is running out and there is still some work to be done. When the deadline arrives, most will have managed to complete the task, probably finalizing the last details the day before the deadline. They will have expanded the task adjusting it to the time available according to Parkinson’s law.
But let’s now think about the possibility that the teacher had given in to the students’ demands and had extended the deadline, 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 start doing the work as soon as possible, even if it was only to establish the initial strokes. However, many would choose to postpone it indefinitely, precisely because they would know they had plenty of time as Parkinson’s law dictates.
But time moves 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 begun to do a job for which they considered they needed more. of those three weeks. At that point they would begin to work piecework in order to deliver the assignment on time.
The conclusion that 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 cases: Parkinson’s law made the students distribute the task during all the time they had. available, arriving at the delivery date in similar conditions.
Parkinson’s law in 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 constantly expanded, 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 from 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, given such a decrease in resources in this specific field, the number of officials and bureaucrats in charge of this sector could also have been affected and therefore reduced in number, at least in part. 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 hired , specifically 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 its 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 them 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 evident that the more bureaucrats there are in a system, the greater amount of procedures and paperwork they will generate towards the next lower level. That is to say, there is a paradox that, with a greater number of employees, the level of work they generate and which therefore must be managed is greater.
This phenomenon has been studied at a mathematical level, reaching the conclusion that If a pyramid of bureaucrats experiences continued growth of 6%, there comes a time when it collapses by dedicating all its resources to the maintenance of its administration without being able to cope with the work that must be produced.
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 recounts three different laws which are what we are going to explain below.
1. Work expansion
We have already related the first of these Parkinson’s laws in detail. This is the principle by which a job to be done will expand until it occupies the entire time slot that has been assigned to complete it. That’s why, The same task can take us a week or a month to complete, assuming that the amount of time we have for it is one or the other
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 are going to grow until it has completely covered the amount of income it has available Therefore, if we had more income, it is most likely that we would generate more expenses immediately afterwards.
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 dedicate more time to 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.
