Parkinson's Law

Imagine you have a full week to prepare a simple, two-page project proposal. The first few days, it feels like a luxury. You tell yourself there’s plenty of time. You might do a little research, open a document, and write a headline. But then, other “urgent” things pop up. By Thursday, a mild panic sets in. Finally, on Friday you realize the task in less than two hours, sending it a few minutes before the deadline. Congratulations, the two-hour task took you the entire work week and you finished it last minute in a rush.

Sound familiar? This strange, elastic nature of work (its ability to stretch and fill whatever time we give it) is a recognized principle of human behavior known as Parkinson’s Law. The law itself states that:

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Named after British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson, who first described this phenomenon in a 1955 essay for The Economist, this observation reveals a fundamental truth about human behavior and time management. The work tend to stretch out to match whatever deadline or time we set. If you know there’s a lot of time before a deadline, your focus can drift. You might tell yourself, “I’ll start tomorrow” or “I can always add those extra details later.” Before you know it, the deadline is here and the task has magically taken all that time. Parkinson’s Law teaches us to be mindful of this habit and to set smarter time limits.

Parkinson illustrated his point with the famous, whimsical example of an elderly lady whose only task for the day is to mail a single postcard. A busy person might complete this in three minutes. But for this lady, it becomes a day-long epic: an hour to find the card, thirty minutes to find her glasses, ninety minutes to write it, and so on, until the entire day is consumed by a simple task.

This may seem exaggerated, but the principle appears in modern life constantly. See if you recognize any of these scenarios:

• The Student Syndrome: A student is given a month for an essay but only starts working in the final few days, pulling stressful all-nighters to meet the deadline.
• The Meeting That Fills the Hour: A meeting scheduled for 60 minutes will almost always last 60 minutes, filled with rambling and trivialities, even if the core agenda could be resolved in 15 minutes.
• The Perfect Presentation: Spending days tweaking fonts, animations, and wording on a presentation that was fundamentally complete after the first few hours.
• The Home Declutter Project: A plan to clean out one closet on a Saturday morning expands to become an all-weekend ordeal of sorting, reminiscing, and online shopping for new organizers.

When a deadline is too far away, the healthy, motivating sense of urgency that focuses the brain is absent. Our brain, wired to respond to immediate threats and rewards, sees no reason to act and defaults to lower-priority activities. Depending on your personality it can be related to multiple factors:

The comfort of extra time creates an illusion that tasks can be completed leisurely, leading to inefficient use of available hours. When deadlines feel distant, the urgency to act diminishes. A temporal discounting happens - our brains prefers immediate rewards (peace) over delayed gratification (finishing the task).

Emerges naturally when deadlines seem far away. Without immediate pressure, it’s easy to tell ourselves “I’ll start tomorrow,” and tomorrow becomes next week.

Given unlimited time, perfectionists fall into the trap of constant tweaking and unnecessary iterations. While quality improvement is valuable, the incremental return on investment (effect you get from each additional effort) drops rapidly after a certain point.

1. The Trigger: Vague or Distant Deadlines
   Instead of asking how much time a task requires, you focus on how much time is available. This simple shift in perspective is the seed from which the problem grows.

2. The Expansion: Fear of Idleness and Perfectionism
   You see being busy as equated with being valuable or productive. Given extra time, you feel a subconscious pressure to fill it. You do this by inflating the task’s complexity.

3. The Consequence: Task Aversion and Procrastination
   The once-simple task has now been transformed into a complex, intimidating monster. This triggers “task aversion,” a psychological phenomenon where you subconsciously delay a task to avoid the anxiety it now causes.

4. The Climax: Last-Minute Urgency
   Eventually, the deadline becomes imminent. This finally triggers the brain’s “fight-or-flight” response, providing the focus and adrenaline needed to complete the task. You get it done, but at the cost of high stress, frantic work, and potential burnout.

This cycle reveals that procrastination and perfectionism are often symptoms, not the root cause. The real culprit is the initial failure to correctly scope the task - the oversized time container.

Create your own deadlines even when none exist externally. If a project doesn’t have a firm due date, impose one on yourself. This generates the positive urgency needed to maintain focus and momentum.

Before accepting or setting a deadline, ask: “If I focused intensely with no distractions, how long would this actually take?” Use your past experience as a guide. If you feel it may help you, tell a colleague, friend, or manager your self-imposed deadline. This adds a layer of accountability that makes you more likely to stick to it.

Large, daunting projects are prime victims of Parkinson’s Law. The solution is to break them down into smaller, more manageable steps or “chunks”. Instead of a single overwhelming task like “Write Research Paper,” break it into a series of concrete sub-tasks: “Conduct literature review,” “Create outline,” “Write first draft of Section 1,” and so on. Then, assign a separate deadline to each chunk. This creates multiple small finish lines, building momentum and preventing the entire project from expanding.

Time boxing involves allocating a specific, limited amount of time and working on a task only within that time frame. You say, “I will work on this report for the next 45 minutes and then stop,” rather than, “I will work until this report is done.”

A popular timeboxing method is the Pomodoro Technique where you work in 25-minute intervals with 5-minute breaks. It forces you to focus on essential elements rather than getting lost in minor details.

Focus on what’s important for the task and let go of perfection on small details. Ask yourself: “What must be done for this to be considered complete?” Don’t spend hours polishing things that others won’t even notice.

For any given task, write down concrete criteria that will signal its completion.

Vague Definition: “Finish the presentation.”

Clear Definition: “Presentation has 10 slides, a clear introduction and conclusion, data sources are cited, and it has been spell-checked once.”

Once you meet your pre-defined criteria, stop. This is a powerful antidote to the endless cycle of “one more tweak” that fuels perfectionism and wastes time.

Make a crucial mindset shift: evaluate your work based on the results achieved, not the time spent. At the end of the day, ask “What did I accomplish?” not “Was I busy?”

An example of this mindset change on an organizational level can be Basecamp - the software company that famously implemented “Summer Hours” - working four-day weeks during the summer. They found that with fewer official hours, employees were forced to be more efficient, cutting out trivial matters and focusing on what was truly important, without any loss in productivity.