Parkinson’s Law in Meetings
Some years ago a British bureaucrat, C. Northcote Parkinson, wrote a little book called Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress. This book has had a profound influence on millions of people over the decades.
Parkinson’s Law says that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” So, if you have eight hours to complete a list of tasks, you will take the full eight hours to complete the tasks and will still be rushing at the end of the day.
What Parkinson noted, in studying the British civil service, was that no matter how many people were hired and how large the departments became, everyone was busy all day long, even if very little was actually being accomplished. This is one of the great weaknesses of bureaucracies of all kinds, but especially government bureaucracies.
Parkinson at Meetings
This law applies especially to meetings. Meetings expand to fill the time allotted for them. If you allocate two hours to cover the agenda at a meeting, it will take the full two hours, and you will be rushing at the end, and often making poor decisions, to finish the meeting. But if you allocate only one hour to cover the same number of agenda items, you will quite surprisingly finish up within one hour.
The rule is to “start on time and end early.” Announce a start time. Assume the latecomer is not coming and begin. Move quickly from point to point as you go through the agenda. Don’t get off track or waste time on other issues.
Break the Law
Your goal is to challenge yourself to break Parkinson’s Law. Set a specific time for the discussion of each item on the agenda. When you hand out the agenda, note the time that will be spent in the right-hand margin, such as 9:00–9:10. This is a not-so-subtle way of getting people to get to the point and to avoid digressing into other subjects.
When people realize that the time allocated for the meeting or for the discussion of a particular item in the meeting is limited, they will be much more likely to get right to the point, and stay on point.
Allocate Your Time
You can also use this breaking of Parkinson’s Law in every other part of your work and planning. When someone calls you on the phone or drops by and wants to talk to you, you immediately respond by saying, “I have a call coming in eight minutes from now.” Or, “I have exactly eleven minutes to talk to you before I have to leave.”
Many of the most effective executives I work with will tell me upfront that they have only a specific number of minutes to talk, so—can we get right to the point?
A person who would normally take thirty or forty minutes to speak will get right to the point in the first two minutes. Very often these people will cover everything on their agendas in just a few minutes.
Set a Deadline
The best thing you can do, if you find yourself with talkative people who tend to drag out meetings, is to say that you must all be out of there in sixteen minutes. An odd time really intimidates people. And as you approach the deadline that you have announced, begin folding up your materials and putting them away in preparation to leave. People will get to the point and stay on the point quite quickly under these circumstances.
You can use this technique yourself to dramatically increase both your efficiency and your effectiveness. Give yourself tight deadlines to complete important tasks. You will be amazed at how much you can get done when you give yourself a cutoff time when you will have to leave or go on to something else.