Parkinson's law
Parkinson's law is the adage that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Cyril Northcote Parkinson coined it in a satirical 1955 Economist essay about bureaucracy, and although it is an observation rather than a scientific law, deadline experiments consistently show that people use however much time they are given.
| Field | Management / popular psychology (originally satire) |
|---|---|
| Key researchers | Cyril Northcote Parkinson (originator); deadline research by Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch |
| Related concepts | Timeboxing, planning fallacy, deadlines, temporal motivation theory |
Why it matters for procrastination
Generous deadlines feed procrastination twice: they keep the task in the low-urgency zone where temporal discounting mutes its pull, and they invite the task itself to bloat. The practical inversion is timeboxing, deciding the time first and fitting the work to it. Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002, Psychological Science) found that self-imposed interim deadlines improved performance over a single distant one, though evenly spaced external deadlines worked best. Short artificial deadlines are the cheapest way to buy the focus a real deadline eventually forces.
Related
Temporal discountingPomodoro Technique
Frequently asked questions
Is Parkinson's law scientifically proven?
No. It began as satire and remains a rule of thumb, not an established psychological law. But related findings are solid: people procrastinate more under distant deadlines, and shorter or interim deadlines reliably compress effort, which is the useful part of the claim.