Work expands to fill the time available

Let’s say you’re starting a personalised cupcake business. You and your friend make the cakes and ship them out yourself. You film your mate icing the cupcakes and put the videos out on TikTok.

Your channel goes viral so you hire someone to do your social media. As demand increases you hire a couple more bakers and a project manager. Then you need an office manager and before long an HR person, an accountant, someone to manage the website, a procurement specialist to find the best ingredients at the cheapest price, and so on.

This is Parkinson’s law in action, and it’s the reason your cupcakes aren’t as nice as they used to be. More to the point, it shows us why we can never do all the things, because there will always be more things that demand to be done, especially if someone’s livelihood depends on you being given more things to do. Thanks, capitalism.

The law – it’s a law of nature, of course; I didn’t invent it, I discovered it – the law is that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. And it has a number of important corollaries: one of them being that in any administrative organisation… the administrative staff will increase each year by a known percentage, irrespective of the work, if any, to be done.

– C. Northcote Parkinson

Cyril Northcote Parkinson was born in 1909, in Barnard Castle on the borders of Yorkshire and Durham in the UK. He spent his childhood in York, and studied history at Cambridge. During the second world war, he was a schoolmaster at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth.

In 1955, Parkinson wrote an essay for the Economist which opened with that famous line about work expanding to fill the time available. He’d go on to explain how this works in big bureaucracies and businesses; how managers hire more managers and give more work to the managers they hired. But at its core is a fundamental principle we experience as individuals every day.

How to Parkinson yourself

If we go back to the first beginnings of that cupcake business, imagine you and your mate are selling personalised cupcakes door-to-door. You want to start local, so you cost up some flyers you can pass around.

You give yourself an hour after work to write a quick bit of copy for the flyers. You need to work quickly ‘cos it’s got to go off to the printers in the morning. So you knock up some bullet points about how tasty they are, how they’re made with natural, organic ingredients, and that they’re baked just a few doors down.

Your flyer’s ready to be printed and in a couple of days, you’re out there sliding them through people’s letterboxes and leaving them under windscreen wipers. All in all you drop a hundred leaflets and you get 20 calls.

But what if you gave yourself more time? What if the printers didn’t need your design til Monday? That would give you the whole weekend to work on it. If your copy were more persuasive, maybe you could go from 20 calls to 35 or 40.

So you spend the morning researching the copywriting techniques of Innocent Smoothies and the like. You walk to your favourite café so you can grab a nice coffee and be among other creative types. You map out all your objectives on PostIt notes and then transfer them to your laptop.

You spend an hour or so writing, then run your text through ChatGPT and Claude and implement all the suggestions they give you. You watch an interview with Amy Porterfield on marketing and throw everything out and start again.

By the end of the weekend you’ve got the same number of words that say the same thing, but this time you know you’ve really worked at it. You drop a hundred leaflets and you get 20 calls.

Well done, you just Parkinsoned yourself.

This isn’t just a trite observation about procrastination, by the way. Studies in the 60s and the 90s absolutely bear this out.

Parkinson's Law at work

In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, subjects were given a task to do that should’ve taken five minutes. The people running the test “accidentally” gave them 10 more minutes, and what they found was that the subjects worked longer on the task instead of taking the free time.

And in a 1999 experiment published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, subjects were given four sets of images to analyse. They were told the fourth set was cancelled just before they started, so they spent the rest of their time working on the third set instead of putting their hand up and saying “done”.

Why we see Parkinson's Law proven out

Some of it we can put down to good ol’ procrastination. Jobs that feel daunting or have deadlines that are way off tend to lead to us suddenly and urgently needing to clean the guttering or rehang all the doors or learn to waterski. Or we end up preparing for ages, setting the scene and getting everything just so, before it’s time to stop.

Deadlines help us sharpen our focus, making it easier for us to break them down into manageable chunks. Without that clarity, work can feel more nebulous and complicated, which for most of us is not satisfying stuff to grapple with.

If you’ve lived away from home you’ll probably have experienced this. Your clothes can spend their whole happy lives spread out on the floor of your bedroom or draped over chairs. You’ve got “put your clothes away” on your todo list, but there’s always something else that needs doing. Until your mum invites herself over for tea and it’s like “Right, that’s it! Shove all the clothes in the wardrobe, dust every surface, brush the cat, lint-roller the boyfriend…

There’s nothing like a mother’s judgement to light a fire under you.

Of course, deadlines don’t work for everyone. Douglas Adams famously said he loved the whooshing sound of a passing deadline. But he created the Pangalactic Gargleblaster and the Babel Fish so he gets a pass.

The Yerkes-Dodson curve

There’s a related law in play here too, which draws a curve in the shape of a bell to map out how we perform under stress. At the top of the bell is peak performance which is due to just the right amount of stress. On the left, the curve dips down because the job’s too boring, while on the right it dips down because the job’s too stressful. Picking your clothes up from the floor is just not an interesting job, so there’s no urgency. But contemplate the grief you’ll get when your mum pops round, and that’s just enough stress to make it interesting. We have messers Yerkes and Dodson to thank for that li’l nugget.

How to avoid Parkinsoning yourself

Let’s say you and your mate need to write and record a TikTok video for your cupcake bakery. You’re planning on putting out a video every week. You could take the whole week and agonise over your hook, hone each transition, and sharpen your call-to-action. Or you could give yourself just an hour, after which, you have to upload what you have.

If you’re thinking that setting an artificial deadline won’t work because you know there’s more time, you’re right. Sometimes this sense of urgency – even artificial – can help us get moving. But other times it can be helpful to find a buddy who can keep you on track. Maybe find someone who also needs to get something out without procrastinating over it. Hold yourselves mutually accountable, and you might be surprised how well that works.

Similarly, you can set out a block of time in your calendar and allocate it to this task and this task alone. This is called timeboxing, and we’ll investigate it in another episode.

Another approach is to put the Eisenhower Matrix to use. We covered this all the way back in episode one, and it can help us decide how much time we should reasonably give each task.

Something else we’re going to cover in more detail is the pomodoro technique, which divides work time into 25 minute distraction-free increments. The idea is you focus on the work for just 25 minutes, silencing any apps or devices that might go “bing” and pull you away, then take a 5-minute break. If we take our TikTok video as an example, we might think of that as two pomodoro units, or 50 minutes of total, uninterrupted work time.

We talked about procrastination earlier, and one of the biggest reasons we find ourselves in that zone is because the work feels too nebulous and scary. Especially if that work involves putting ourselves out into the world, showing our faces or exposing our hearts. The trick here is to break the TikTok task down into smaller chunks:

Outline the video
Write each story beat
Do a quick storyboard
Setup the equipment
Record the clips
Edit them together
Write a brief description
Hit Post

Knowing when to call a job done

Of course there are always going to be some jobs that just take a certain amount of time to complete. Poaching an egg, toasting some bread, Hulk-smashing an avocado; these are finite and predictable. There’s a minimum amount of time it takes to research and write this podcast. I could spend a week on each episode and hone every word so sharp you could cut your finger on them. But it also takes time to read and understand the source material.

If you do creative work, you want it to be the best it can be. But if that work involves regular output like posting to YouTube or writing a newsletter, there’s only so much finesse you can add before at some point you have to call it “done”. MasterChef contestants don’t finish cooking when they’ve made the perfect dish; they finish cooking when John Torode declares time to be up.

A good way to get a handle on how much time you should spend is by tracking it. We’ll talk about time-tracking at some point soon too, but this is something that can help you get a good handle on where your time is going. If the last newsletter you made took an hour from soup to nuts, what would happen if you gave yourself just 20 minutes, stuck to a template, and wrote it more like a WhatsApp message than a piece of marketing?

The busywork inherent in capitalism

Now, I mentioned capitalism right at the start of this episode, and there’s a knotty thing to wrestle with if you work for someone else. Just as work can expand to fill the time available, the more efficient you become as a worker, the more work you’ll be given… even if that work is just to keep you at your desk.

According to a survey in 2016, we spend less than 40% of our time doing the stuff we’re actually meant to do. The rest we spend in our inboxes, or writing status reports, or going to meetings.

It’s our duty, then, as cogs in a featureless machine, to add just enough friction so we can do the work we’re assigned, without being punished for efficiency. All that energy we save by resting and avoiding busywork we can spend at home, working on relationships with people we love, or making something that’ll outlast us.

How do we do that? By setting tighter deadlines so we don’t waste time on our own busywork, knowing when to say good enough is good enough, and breaking big, scary tasks into smaller, manageable ones. Remember, a life of creative pursuit is not the icing on the cake, it’s the whole damn cake.