Parkinson’s Law: It’s Real, So Use It

Parkinson’s Law states that “work continues to expand to fill the available time for completion.” Although it is counterintuitive, you will find that through practice and experience, there is a a lot of This is true. Projects with no set deadlines, even self-imposed ones, will take a while a lot of take longer than they need to and may suffer from feature creep and scope bloat.

By setting challenging deadlines, you’ll actually get better results. It’s all about manipulating the iron triangle of scope, resources, and time.

If you haven’t encountered the Iron Triangle before, it represents three key limitations of the project:

• scopethis is what needs to be done.

• resourcewhich are the people and tools available to get the job done.

• time Not surprisingly, that’s when you have to get it done. Who would have thought?

You can’t change one without affecting the others. For example, if you want to do more To work, you either need more people or more time. This is the embodiment of the “either/or” rule: you can have something good, fast, or cheap, but you can’t have all three.

Back to Parkinson’s Law: Without strict time constraints, the scope of a team’s project will expand to fill the available time. This is human nature. Just look at how long it takes for my clean laundry to sit in the basket before I actually put it away, or how long those little DIY jobs around the house take to complete. There’s no deadline, there’s no sense of urgency, so things don’t happen.

So, the deadline is valid. Now, a common rebuttal to deadlines is that “fake” deadlines lead to poor The work is being done, and, look: there’s sometimes This is true. However, when this happens it usually means Poor applicationrather than a methodological issue. Set a challenging time frame for the project healthy The environment can lead to serious innovation and creativity. Doing the same thing with an impossible timebox in a toxic environment will result in all the bad things you’d expect.

expiration date real Help humans get things done. The only way I can write a book is because I set myself a challenging but not impossible schedule with my publisher. of this contract external responsibility Keeping the flame going over the long haul, it forced me to make clear decisions about what to include, what to exclude, and how to manage my spare time so that I could make progress.

this precise The same goes for communications and software projects.

When you ask people to do something, start by suggesting when it should be done. Be clear about this, but be willing to negotiate. It’s a very simple technique, but when you use it at a large company for more than a year, you’ll be surprised at the difference it makes.

Deadlines force us to have a clear rhythm and rhythm, and essentially, they make things happen. A typical example is sending a questionnaire that can be filled out whenever and one item that needs to be filled in before tomorrow: Just ask and you’ll get a higher response rate, faster. Learn from it and apply it to your own communication.

This rhythm and tempo is critical to effective leadership. Even though you might not think people want it, even though people themselves Think they don’t want it because know things need to be done by a deadline Right on the cusp of the storm The existence of a comfort zone forces people to make real, practical progress. If you think the prototype might take a month, why not challenge the team to see what they can deliver by the end of the week?

You’ll be surprised, and so will they.

First, please note that humans always Underestimate what they can accomplish in a week. See how many teams, projects, and tasks you can inject a weekly reporting cadence into: let teams plan, execute, and report on what they’re doing each week, write up their progress in updates, and share them widely in one place Anyone can see it. This discipline is energizing, and you’ll soon find that it completely reshapes the way people think about work. Your employees will actively look forward to completing their work so they can write and share their progress every Friday afternoon.

When approached with grace, good intentions, and an understanding of what makes people move and feel good, deadlines can be a powerful tool. Parkinson’s law is realthe bigger your organization is, the harder you have to cope. If you can succeed in this battle, you can grow and keep delivering fast in organizations that scale into the tens of thousands. If you don’t, one day you’ll look around and wonder why your startup became the software equivalent of your local council tax office.

Fight resistance. Set a deadline.