Tasks expand—and contract—to fill the time available.

Use this!

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Tasks expand—and contract— to fill the time available

In a 1955 issue of The Economist, civil servant C Northcote Parkinson began an essay with the sardonic observation that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” He dubbed this “Parkinson’s law”, and Parkinson’s law has been with us ever since. It earned Parkinson lifelong celebrity and a reputation as an expert in public administration. When he died in 1993, carved into his gravestone were the words “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”

Parkinson’s law has spawned serious study in economics, witty observation, and numerous reformulations, the champion of which was coined by cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter’s law, impossibly self-referential yet still right, provides that “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.”¹

Parkinson was writing about public administration. But it’s as a description of human behavior that the observation—that work expands to fill the available time—is devastating. It’s at work in all sorts of situations: clearing a list of things to do, writing an important email, packing for a trip. It’s applied to me as a GP with a list of medical admin tasks, as a lawyer preparing for a court hearing, and at home battling the everyday administration of life. If, one day, I really have to leave work not a minute later than 5:45 pm then, no matter how my day’s going, there’ll be a rush towards the end, and everything somehow gets done by 5:58 pm. Hofstadter got it right: work expands to fill the available time and a bit more.

You can use this!

The principle works two ways. If you truly make only so much time available to a task, it can occupy only so much time (and a bit more). You can exploit this. Set no time limit on getting something tedious done, and it’ll take forever. But, within the limits of realism, if you allow yourself an hour, and that’s a genuine constraint, not one you know you can exceed, the same task will get done in the hour (or a little longer). It’s amazing how much revision can be packed into the day before the exam.

Start ploughing through something when there’s an opportunity for a break ahead, and it’ll spill into and consume your break, because you’ll know it can. Instead, do first the stuff you most want to spend your time on, such as the revitalizing break, so the task gets packed into time you make for it. Use Parkinson’s law not to work harder (“I’ll get it all done somehow”) but to be kind to yourself: have that vital half-hour break with colleagues before doing the stuff you have to get done. You’ll be happier for having a break and, as we’ve seen, you’ll get more done, better, as a result.

1. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).