Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law is a law attributed to its creator who goes by the name Northcote C. Parkinson. Parkinson documented his law in his books “Parkinson's Law”, “Mrs Parkinson's law” and other studies in domestic science. The law states that “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." That is, the size of a job is directly proportional to the time available to complete it; and as work increases, so does the time required to complete it.

Parkinson's Law of Meetings:

Parkinson's Law of Meetings states that "To a certain degree, the time spent in a meeting on an item is inversely proportional to its value".

To gain a better understanding behind this principle, consider a typical meeting for middle management; they have two issues to discuss with one being a car park and the other being a more complex issue on how to power their company using wind energy. First, they put the car park issue on the table and because everyone present knows something about a car park (including design, cost, location, etc) the meeting drags on and on. However, when the issue about powering the company using wind energy was tabled, no one seems to say anything because they hardly knew a thing about it. Perhaps one or two heard about it before but they are not particularly sure so they said nothing. Nevertheless, it’s expected that they all know installing a wind farm is far more expensive than building a car park but nothing else.

Based on that analogy, you can see that the time spent in the meeting on a more valuable car park is more compared to that of a wind farm they find less valuable to their immediate need; remember they’d stay with the conventional powering plan and remain fine for time to come.

Other Laws Attributed to Parkinson’s Law:

Aside from the Parkinson’s Law described above, Northcote C. Parkinson and other interested parties were also able to develop more laws similar to the work related one to cater for other fields of life. Some of those laws are as described briefly below.

1. Parkinson's First Law states that ‘Work expands to fill the time available for its completion’.
2. Parkinson's Second Law: ‘Expenditures or “money paid” out rises to meet income’.
3. Parkinson's Third Law: ‘Expansion means complexity; and complexity decay’.
4. Parkinson's Fourth Law: ‘The number of people in any working group tends to increase irrespective of the amount of work to be completed’.
5. Parkinson's Fifth Law: ‘If there is a way to delay an important decision the good bureaucracy (or non-elected government officials), public or private, will find it’.
6. Parkinson's Law of Science: The progress of science varies and is inversely proportional to the number of journals published.
7. Parkinson's Law of Delay: ‘Delay or procrastination is the deadliest form of denial’.
8. Parkinson's Law of Data: ‘Data expands continuously to fill the space available for it”.
9. Parkinson's Law of 1000: ‘An enterprise employing more than 1000 people becomes a self-perpetuating empire, creating so much internal work that it no longer needs any contact with the outside world’.
10. Mrs. Parkinson's Law: ‘Heat produced by pressure expands to fill the mind available, from which it can pass only to a cooler mind’.