Work expands to fill all time available for its completion
I’ve been thinking lately about time and deadlines. Do any of these sound familiar?
- You go to a meeting scheduled for an hour. A project decision is made in the first fifteen minutes, and the next forty-five minutes are spent discussing and re-hashing that decision…only to then settle on the original decision.
- Your software team works in two week sprints yet seems to scramble in the last several days of each sprint to finish the bulk of the work.
- In a project with a deadline months away, the requested feature list continues to change and grow while the deadline remains the same.
These examples are all instances of Parkinson’s Law: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Read more