Parkinson’s Law and Order

There is a well-known management adage called Parkinson’s Law, which states “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” coined by C. Northcote Parkinson in a satirical 1955 essay in The Economist commenting on bureaucratic inefficiency. In summary, this statement means that if we are given a task to do, we can let that task take 1 hour or 8 hours, depending on how much time we have available to us to complete the task, not dependent on how much time we actually need to do that task. What that looks like practically: if you have an email inbox, it can take your whole business day to respond to your emails, or it can take you an hour. It’s up to you, and how much else you have planned to fit into that business day!

For those of you who have been here since the beginning of this blog, you’ll remember that I covered a part of this topic in my “how wearing earplugs on vacation translated to me changing how I worked” blog (which apparently struck a nerve, because it is my most popular post!), but I wanted to elaborate more on that topic here, because I think it’s important to understand that how we think about our time and our work directly translates to how we treat it.

Email is the most obvious way to think about this topic, because it is ubiquitous in our business cultures. If we leave our email inbox open, emails will populate in there of their own free will (!), all day every day. And we can certainly spend our whole day addressing them as they come in, responding, sorting, filing, forwarding, deleting. It gives us a tiny little dopamine hit every time, and our brains are perfectly content to fill a day responding to things that are coming in, our brains love to firefight with a built-in to-do list, which is essentially what email is. So we can lose a whole work day in that manner, especially if our goals are undefined, our roles and responsibilities are unclear, or if we are a fast worker and can get our work tasks done and/or meet goals in a shorter time than our colleagues.

Alternatively, you can set boundaries in your schedule and calendar that look something like this: “I check my email first thing in the morning for an hour, mid-day for 30 minutes, and end of day for 30-minutes.” If you do this, you will find that the time that it takes you to get your email inbox caught up will often match the time that you have allotted to it in those blocks. (Obviously, some of us have much more email hitting our inboxes than others, but in terms of things we are actually responsible for responding to, we should be utilizing our tools [snooze, folders, delegation, etc.] wisely and making our email work for us, not the other way around! YOU ARE THE BOSS OF YOUR EMAIL. YOUR EMAIL DOES NOT BOSS YOU. WRITE THIS ON A POST-IT NOTE AND PUT IT ON YOUR MONITOR IF YOU HAVE TO.) You have then, magically, freed up 6 hours or so of work time each day to do other work. Important work! Strategic work, goal-directed work, proactive thinking and planning, and other things that are value-add activities to your position and your company. Email is none of those things, and it is never in the best use of our time to fill our days with reactive, low-value work when we could be filling it with high-value, engaging work that we (hopefully) enjoy more than responding to email!

Parkinson’s Law is a well-known adage for a reason. It happens in EVERY WORKPLACE. There is nothing shameful or regretful about letting reactive work balloon through your work day and take it over all day every day to the point where you’re simultaneously exhausted and you don’t know what you actually got done that day. We’re human. Sometimes we’re just tired, and we can’t rise above that fact. That’s ok! Give yourself a little grace for just trying to survive and thrive in a world that asks way too much of us.

But if you’re ever in a more proactive headspace and/or frustrated with how little progress you’re making on your big strategic goals and plans and building and growing the way you’d like, it’s worth taking a look at the boundaries, or lack thereof, that you have put in your work day (and your team’s work days). If you don’t become the boss of your tasks and your calendar, your tasks will take over your day. You have to put them in their place, and restore the order to your workday by prioritizing the important work that will move your business forward. Show Parkinson who the real BOSS of your work day is. You. It’s always you!