PARKINSON’S LAW

In today’s business environment, business professionals and managers allude to Parkinson’s Law. It states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. If you have ten hours available to do a job, for example, you’ll take the full ten hours to complete it. The basis for this law is that people will fill the vacuum created by the time assigned to perform a task, even if it means procrastinating.

For most tasks, Parkinson’s Law makes sense. Having too much time to complete a task leads to statusing games like the 90 percent syndrome. This syndrome occurs when people say they’re 90 percent done with a task, until, at the last minute, they slide the final completion date. The question then arises: whatever happened to the last 10 percent?

Understanding Parkinson’s Law provides several benefits for project assignment. It enables you to reevaluate time estimates, and it gives you clues into what tasks to monitor more closely than others. It also encourages maintaining a healthy skepticism when status information is submitted.

for Overcoming Parkinson’s Law

• Determine priorities.
• Give more time to top priorities.
• Use reliable estimating techniques.
• Take frequent measurements on performance.
• Maintain visibility of those measurements.