How to Use Parkinson’s Law to Your Advantage
Parkinson’s law was named after a British author and naval historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson. After carefully observing organisations’ functioning he made an eye-opening discovery that became known as Parkinson’s Law.
He realised that with the time increase the same workload can be unnecessarily extended just to fill the expanded time frame. He went on to successfully apply this law to the area of finances explaining why the rich get richer whilst the poor get deeper and deeper into debt.
Although Parkinson’s law was intended to highlight the problems of time and money management, this law can be applied in reverse for personal and organisational efficiency. Northcote Parkinson’s great insight into this principle will encourage you to boost your productivity and increase your leisure time.
The best Parkinson’s Law Example – Dysfunctional Workplaces
Someone sometime said that office work should be done from nine in the morning till five in the afternoon.
No matter how much or little work actually needs to be done, it must be scattered throughout this allocated time.
Employees are given unimportant paperwork and other tasks just to keep them busy till the end of the working day. They waste their precious time shuffling papers, making coffee and doing other useless activities causing zero productivity to the company. Companies’ disregard to the Parkinson’s law causes them to lose a lot of money and time.
Some big companies apply the 80/20 principle, yet the equally important Parkinson’s law remains widely disregarded.
Parkinson’s Law and Money
Expenditures rise to meet income.
Cyril Northcote Parkinson
A great illustration of this law can be seen in finances. It explains why the rich get richer, whilst the poor get more into debt.
The more money poor people earn, the more obligations they take on their shoulders. Along with the increase of personal income they get bigger homes (thus, bigger mortgages), second cars or even consider having more children.
On the contrary, the rich never spend more than they earn. They let their savings compound which make them increasingly richer.
This law teaches that even if poor people got promoted or attained a large amount of money, they would still remain poor as they would adjust their expenditures along with the increase in finances.
Northcote Parkinson’s goes on to say in his book: Financial independence comes from violating Parkinson’s law. Thus if you want to become rich, you have to spend less than you earn.
How to apply Parkinson’s Law?
You can use this law to your advantage. Stop spending hours of your time on one activity. Try to squeeze your work into several hours and enjoy free time however you like.
Do not attempt to apply this law in the workplace. Your boss may ask you to do twice the amount of your daily tasks! If you get bonus for extra work, then it is fine. If this is not the case, this law should be disregarded:)
If you are trying to establish your own business or are already a business owner, this law will save you a great deal of time and many headaches.
Focus solely on one peace of work within the given deadline and you will achieve much better results. When the work has a deadline you will naturally eliminate all the unnecessary work and concentrate only on essential tasks.
Therefore it is better to give yourself two hours time to accomplish quite large project rather than to dedicate a whole week for that.
When you apply Parkinson’s law to your daily activities you will notice how much spare time you have left. This law will make you productive and pro-active.
Start applying this law now.
Here are the steps you can follow:
- Plan your daily activities in advance.
- Enter into your daily planner the deadlines for each activity.
- Try to keep the time frames short, so as to achieve better productivity.
- Try to stay within the deadline no matter what you do.
- Skip the unnecessary tasks if you see that you are likely to go over the deadline.
- Do not let anyone distract you from your work.
These steps will keep you focused and effective.
It is important to give yourself as short deadline as possible. Try at least once to halve the time of your usual activity. I do that all the time. You will not believe how effective this really is until you try.
When you strictly say to yourself when the work should be accomplished by, your unconscious mind takes notice of that.
When you write the deadline down, it works even better. Sometimes I do not even need to look at the time, as my subconscious mind is working silently to keep up with the deadline without my interference.
Who was the man behind Parkinson’s Law?
Cyril Northcote Parkinson was an author and historian. He wrote around sixty books. The most famous book he wrote, unsurprisingly, is called Parkinson’s Law.
Northcote Parkinson studied history at the University of Cambridge and then enrolled to the King’s College London.
When Great Britain entered World War II, Parkinson got involved in the administration for the British War Office and the Royal Air Force.
That’s where he started observing useless bureaucracy and got inspiration to write his famous book. He published Parkinson’s Law in 1958.
The book was full of case studies of dysfunctional paperwork and other time consuming work tasks. In this book, Northcote Parkinson reached the conclusion that ‘work expands to fill the time available for its completion’.
In 1960 he became a full time independent writer. He moved from England to the Channel Islands.
After the death of his second wife, he married to Iris Hilda Waters and moved to the Isle of Man. Shortly they moved to Kent where he died aged 83.
C. Northcote Parkinson Quotes
The smaller the function, the greater the management.
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
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My name is Simona Rich and I help people improve themselves through the articles and products of this website. Although I have found my life's purpose and now I spend my time traveling throughout India and sharing my knowledge, my life used to be completely different.
[...] Do not waste your time on unnecessary activities. [...]