Parkinson's law

Based on Wikipedia: Parkinson's law

The Bureaucracy Always Grows

In 1954, the British Colonial Office employed more people than at any point in its history. There was just one problem: there were almost no colonies left to administer. The sun had finally set on the British Empire, yet the paperwork had never been more voluminous.

This absurdity caught the attention of Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a naval historian with a gift for satire. In 1955, he published an essay in The Economist that would immortalize his name alongside a simple observation: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

But this famous formulation, the one plastered on motivational posters and cited in productivity blogs, was actually the secondary point of his essay. The real Parkinson's Law—the one he spent pages elaborating with mock-scientific rigor—concerned something far more insidious. Bureaucracies grow whether or not there is work for them to do.

The Two Forces of Bureaucratic Expansion

Parkinson identified two mechanisms driving organizational bloat. Both stem from the incentives of middle management, and both operate with the inevitability of gravity.

The first force: an official wants subordinates, not rivals. When a manager feels overworked, they face a choice. They could share responsibilities with a colleague, but that colleague might become a competitor for future promotions. Far safer to hire two junior employees who report upward. These subordinates pose no threat—quite the opposite, they enhance the manager's importance.

The second force: officials make work for each other. Those two new subordinates need supervision. Their work must be reviewed. Memoranda must be written and responded to. Reports must be compiled. Meetings must be scheduled to discuss the reports. Each new person creates obligations for everyone else, generating a self-sustaining cycle of internal activity.

Parkinson estimated that these forces cause bureaucratic headcounts to grow by five to seven percent annually. The astonishing part? This growth rate held constant regardless of whether the organization's actual workload was increasing, decreasing, or nonexistent.

The Admiralty Paradox

Parkinson loved concrete examples, and none was more damning than the British Admiralty.

In 1914, the Royal Navy was the most powerful maritime force on Earth. It commanded 62 capital ships—battleships and battlecruisers capable of projecting power across the globe. The Admiralty employed 2,000 officials to manage this fleet.

By 1928, the navy had shrunk dramatically. Only 20 capital ships remained. The empire was contracting. The great era of naval supremacy was ending.

Yet the Admiralty now employed 3,569 officials. A 78 percent increase in staff to oversee a 68 percent decrease in ships. The bureaucracy had grown in inverse proportion to its purpose.

The Colonial Office followed the same pattern. As colonies gained independence one after another, the office's responsibilities dwindled toward zero. But the staff numbers climbed steadily upward until the department had to be merged into the Foreign Office simply because there was nothing left to administer. Even then, many of those officials found new titles and new offices from which to write memoranda to one another.

Work Expands to Fill the Time

While the bureaucratic growth law was Parkinson's main thesis, his throwaway opening line achieved far greater fame. Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

This version of Parkinson's Law explains why a task that could take one hour somehow consumes an entire afternoon when that's all you have. Give someone a week to complete a report that needs two days, and they will use the full week. Not through laziness, but through a natural expansion of the work itself.

Extra time allows for second-guessing. Revisions multiply. Scope creeps outward. Perfectionism flourishes. The task grows to match its container, like a goldfish expanding to fill its tank.

This insight spawned several corollaries, each capturing a related absurdity of human productivity.

The Stock-Sanford corollary: if you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do. There's a reason college students write their best papers the night before the deadline. Artificial urgency creates efficiency that leisure destroys.

Isaac Asimov, the science fiction author who wrote over 500 books, proposed his own corollary: in ten hours a day you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as in five hours a day. Working longer doesn't mean accomplishing more. It often means generating more incomplete tasks to stress about.

Computer scientists later adapted the principle: data expands to fill the space available for storage. In the 1980s, a ten-megabyte hard drive seemed impossibly vast. By the 2000s, a hundred-gigabyte drive would fill up with photos and downloads within months. Today, terabyte drives face the same fate. No matter how much storage capacity increases, we find ways to use every byte.

The Coefficient of Inefficiency

Parkinson's satirical instincts extended to committee dynamics. He proposed something he called the coefficient of inefficiency—a semi-serious mathematical measure of when a decision-making body becomes too large to function.

Small committees work. Three people can debate, decide, and move forward. Five members can still maintain coherent discussion. But as membership grows, something breaks.

Around twenty members, a committee transforms. Side conversations emerge. Factions form. The official discussion competes with whispered exchanges. Some members check out entirely, knowing their vote barely matters. The leader's authority dilutes across too many personalities to control.

Parkinson studied this phenomenon through British governmental history, tracking how effective governing bodies grew unwieldy and lost power to smaller inner circles.

The Council of the Crown, which evolved into the House of Lords, began as a small advisory body. By the time it exceeded fifty members, it had already lost most of its governing power to nimbler groups.

The Privy Council started with fewer than ten members. When it swelled to forty-seven in 1679, actual decisions had migrated to the Cabinet Council, which conveniently numbered just eight.

By 1740, even the Cabinet Council had grown too large. Real power shifted to an inner group simply called the Cabinet, initially comprising only five members.

The pattern repeated: small groups make decisions, grow in prestige, attract more members, lose effectiveness, and cede power to new small groups. Parkinson suggested this cycle was as predictable as the tides.

From Satire to Policy

Parkinson wrote his essay as humor. The mathematical formulas he included were deliberately overwrought, mocking the tendency of social scientists to dress up common sense in equations. The coefficient of inefficiency featured absurd variables that no one could actually measure.

But the humor resonated because it described something real.

The essay's success surprised everyone, including Parkinson himself. It was reprinted in his 1958 book Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress, which became an international bestseller. Translations appeared in dozens of languages. The book found an especially enthusiastic audience behind the Iron Curtain, where Soviet and Eastern European readers recognized their own bloated bureaucracies in every page.

When Italian politician Alessandro Natta complained to Mikhail Gorbachev about Italy's swelling bureaucracy in 1986, the Soviet leader's response was immediate: "Parkinson's Law works everywhere."

What began as naval historian's joke had become a recognized principle of organizational behavior. Management consultants cited it when recommending corporate restructuring. Politicians invoked it when campaigning against big government. Software engineers referenced it when explaining why projects always seemed to take exactly as long as the allocated time, regardless of actual complexity.

The Productivity Connection

Modern discussions of artificial intelligence and productivity often circle back to Parkinson's observations. If work expands to fill available time, what happens when AI tools dramatically reduce the time required for routine tasks?

One possibility: true productivity gains. Workers accomplish more in less time, organizations shrink to their necessary size, and everyone goes home early.

Parkinson would likely have been skeptical.

His laws suggest that freed-up time doesn't return as leisure or even as capacity for additional meaningful work. Instead, new tasks emerge to fill the void. Reports become more elaborate. Meetings multiply. The bureaucracy finds fresh justifications for its existence.

Consider email. It was supposed to save time compared to physical mail. Instead, the average knowledge worker now spends hours daily managing messages that would never have been sent in an era of stamps and envelopes. The tool created demand for its own use.

Collaboration software promised to reduce meetings. Many organizations found the opposite—digital tools made it so easy to schedule calls that calendars filled completely. The friction that once limited meetings had been a feature, not a bug.

This doesn't mean productivity improvements are impossible. But Parkinson's insight suggests they require more than better tools. They require discipline about what work should expand and what gaps should remain unfilled.

Beyond Government

Although Parkinson focused his analysis on public administration, his principles apply wherever organizations exist.

Private companies exhibit the same dynamics. Successful startups often hire aggressively, creating layers of management that would have seemed absurd in their scrappy early days. Each new layer generates coordination costs: more meetings, more approvals, more time spent communicating rather than producing.

Technology companies have coined their own terms for this phenomenon. "Yak shaving" describes the endless chain of preliminary tasks that must be completed before addressing the original goal. "Bikeshedding" refers to the tendency to spend disproportionate time on trivial decisions while neglecting important ones—a pattern Parkinson himself documented when committees spent hours debating the color of a bike shed while approving nuclear reactor plans in minutes.

Nonprofits, academic institutions, religious organizations—none are immune. The forces Parkinson identified operate wherever humans form hierarchies and wherever promotions depend on the number of people one supervises.

Remedies and Resignation

Parkinson offered his laws with a fatalistic shrug. He wasn't proposing solutions so much as documenting an apparently inevitable feature of organized human activity.

But his observations implicitly suggest countermeasures. If officials multiply because managers want subordinates rather than rivals, then flatter organizations might resist bloat longer. If work expands to fill time, then tighter deadlines might prevent unnecessary elaboration. If committees become ineffective beyond a certain size, then keeping decision-making bodies small could preserve their function.

Some modern management practices embody these ideas. Amazon famously instituted the "two-pizza rule"—teams should be small enough to feed with two pizzas. Tech companies experiment with flat hierarchies. Agile methodologies emphasize short iterations that prevent scope expansion.

Whether these remedies actually work remains debatable. Amazon itself has grown into a massive bureaucracy. Flat organizations often develop informal hierarchies as dysfunctional as official ones. Agile's short sprints sometimes just create more meetings.

Perhaps the deepest lesson of Parkinson's Law is psychological rather than organizational. Awareness of these tendencies might help individuals resist them, even if institutions cannot.

If you notice yourself expanding a task to fill available time, you can choose to finish early instead. If you catch yourself writing a memo primarily to justify your existence, you can delete it. If you're the sixth person invited to a meeting where five people already have the necessary expertise, you can decline.

Parkinson wrote as a satirist, but his satire works because it illuminates genuine patterns of human behavior. The bureaucracy always grows. Work always expands. Committees always bloat.

Knowing this won't stop it. But it might help you notice when you're contributing to the problem rather than the solution.