I ran across a reference to Parkinson’s Law today and decided to dive a little deeper into it. Basically it states:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

and / or

The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource.

Parkinson used this theory to explain why the British Colonial Office grew in number of employees as the actual number of colonies declined – so that it employed more people when the number of colonies had been reduced to zero than when they were at their highest number.

I encourage you though to spend 5 minutes reading more about the theory behind this cheeky saying by reading the first half of this article in The Economist. Really it’s worth it.

I see the mechanics of this law in almost every organization I’ve ever worked at. I also see this at work in me. Over the last year or two it’s tempting to cry that myself and our team is ‘over-worked’ and that we need more resources. In fact our team has contracted quite a bit in the last two years while our attendance has jumped significantly. The key for me is 1.) Am I working on the right things 2.) How are we sharing the load with volunteers.

Knowing the facts of Parkinson’s Law will definitely bring clarity to future resource decisions.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.