Work tends to expand to fill the time available for its completion.
Parkinson's satirical 1955 Economist essay opened with an elderly lady spending a full day on a postcard that a busy person dispatches in three minutes, and noted the Colonial Office growing as the empire shrank. The cleanest test is Bryan and Locke's in 1967: people given twice the time an addition task needed worked more slowly than people given just enough, because the generous deadline led them to set easier goals.
In practice
- A task assigned three weeks in advance is completed in the final two days, and the three weeks were genuinely occupied.
- A meeting scheduled for an hour uses the hour, and the same meeting scheduled for twenty-five minutes reaches the same decision.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is goals, since a generous deadline leads people to set an easier target, which is what the one controlled test found. Another is bureaucratic: officials multiply subordinates rather than rivals, which is Parkinson's own account of growth.
- In its favour
- The bureaucratic growth Parkinson measured in the Colonial Office was real, and the experimental result on pace supports the everyday version.
- Against it
- It began as satire, it specifies no rate or limit, and the evidence concerns how fast people work rather than how well, so it says nothing about quality.
- Standing
- Satirical in origin. The one clean experiment finds the effect in pace and traces it to the goals people set; it is not a universal law, and it measures speed rather than quality. Compare student syndrome, which puts the expansion before the work starts.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life