Applying Parkinson’s Law Effectively

Whether you have heard of Parkinson’s Law or not, you have heard of the idea. Here’s how Cyril Northcote Parkinson opened his essay in The Economist in 1955: “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

That line became known as Parkinson’s Law. It has stimulated research, mathematical models and more to prove it, yet we all, to some degree, know it is true.

Knowing it isn’t enough, though.

Applying it in ways to help improve organizational (and personal) productivity and results is far more important. Here are four of the common situations where the law shows up in the workplace.

Applications of Parkinson’s Law

• Project Deadlines. A team is given two months to complete a project that realistically only requires one month of work. Due to the extended deadline, team members may spread out their efforts, taking more time than necessary for each task, leading to inefficiencies and delays.
• Meeting Length. A meeting is scheduled for an hour. After 40 minutes, decisions have generally been reached, but because “we still have time”, the group continues to discuss topics that already have agreement (or the conversation moves off topic).
• Approval Processes. A document requires multiple levels of approval, and each approver has a week to review it. Even if each review could be completed in a day, the process drags on as one or more of the approvers use the full allotted time.
• Communication Response Times. You send an email on Tuesday, asking for feedback by Friday. The time required to read, reflect and respond to the email with feedback is 30 minutes. Due to the deadline being several days away, you don’t receive all (or any of) the feedback until the deadline approaches, or people forget the request at all.

Taking Parkinson’s Law Beyond Time Alone

Parkinson wrote the initial article not just about time, but about the tendencies for organizations to add to bureaucracy and number of employees (he suggested from his research a 6% increase/year). Here are two important corollaries to Parkinson’s Law:

The more people involved in a project, the longer it will take.

The reasons this happens are many, and there are understandable reasons to expand the group to increase engagement and more. But all studies of human dynamics say that as you add people to a project or task, time and complexity increases.

The more time that is allotted, the more the scope of the task or project will expand.

Scope creep is the bane of most project managers. When people are pressed for time, they are less likely to expand the deliverables. But if there is time to discuss, plan and think, reasonable people will think about things that could be added “as long as we are here, we might as well do this too.” The ideas and items added might be useful and valuable but each additional one delays the delivery of the value in the initial project or task scope.

Leveraging Parkinson’s Law

Here are four things you can do to recognize and overcome Parkinson’s Law:

• Block time more diligently. Blocking time to work on something specific is a tremendous productivity tool. Give yourself a specific block of time to get to completed work. By creating internal deadlines, you overcome the pull of Parkinson’s Law. Encourage teams to do this as well. See the effectiveness of team or project sprints as an example.
• Apply the 80/20 rule. 80% of the results come with 20% of the effort. When we remember that and lean into the right 20% of the work, we will often find we have done all that is needed.
• Cut meeting length. What is so magical about a 60- or 30-minute meeting? Why not 45 minutes or 20 minutes? In many cases, you will get the same results and save 25-33% of the meeting time (for everyone who attends!)
• Reduce project team size. A team of three might be all you need. Rather than adding three more people who have some relevant experience or expertise, pull them in as subject matter experts when needed, and you will save individual time and speed up overall completion of the work.

Cyril Parkinson saw and described something that we can all observe, but he did more than that. By describing “Parkinson’s Law”, he gave us the chance to overcome the natural pull of us to procrastinate and expand work. The best leaders are constantly thinking about how to use this law to our advantage, not simply succumb to its truth.