Parkinson's Law

It began as a half-joking essay by the British historian Parkinson in *The Economist*.

His example: an elderly lady of leisure sending a postcard to her niece. An hour to choose the card, another to find her glasses, half an hour for the address, an hour and a quarter composing it… a three-minute task for a busy person fills her whole day. She is busy the entire time, and not slacking.

He then showed with figures that the Royal Navy kept adding administrative staff while its number of ships shrank. The point was sardonic: work is created because people and time exist, not the other way round.

Several things stack.

A distant deadline means a late start. The more time left, the longer the "still fine" stretch, and the real work bunches up at the end. It is why summer homework happens in the last three days.

Spare time invites extra steps. One more review, one more source, tidier colours on the chart. None of it is useless, but it rarely beats the first version by much.

Nobody defined "done". When the finished state is not fixed, the end of the time becomes the end of the work.

Set your own short deadline. "Done by 3pm today" can turn a week-long task into half a day. The 25-minute Pomodoro works largely for this reason.

Define "done" before you start. "One table, three lines of explanation." Writing down what finished looks like leaves less room to expand.

But shorter is not always better. Where thinking time *is* the value — planning, writing, design — too tight a limit makes the result shallow. Separate whether the thing expanding is the busywork or the thinking.