Time is fleeting.  Ask anyone (except perhaps someone in prison) and they are bound to agree that there is just never enough time.  Life is hectic and demands are forever increasing.  The pace of life and the demands on our time have risen exponentially.  While there are many scarce resources – money, water, arable land, metallic minerals, fish, sand, etc. – none is more finite, non-renewable and precious than time.  And, despite the multitude of time management tools proliferating in the marketplace – timers, alarms, calendars, time tracking software, organization tools, prioritization lists, etc. – time is still the hardest resource to manage because it is a perishable. After all, we cannot store or bank time. We cannot buy more of it or steal it from someone else.  And, while we all think we will get the same amount of this resource at the start of each day, there is no guarantee of that.  Every tombstone in a graveyard is a testament to that.  Some will get 24 hours today and some won’t.  And even if we do get 24 hours in a day, we can’t keep it or save it.  At best, we are forced to trade time for other things.  At worst, we fritter it away on nothing… which is the worst offense of all.

Given how valuable time is, why do we waste time doing things that have little or no value or return?   There are several reasons.

1. Too many choices. There are too many options vying for our time.  Work.  Social interaction.  Errands.  Chores.  Hobbies. Health tasks.  Entertainment.  Even computers have no quick or easy way to determine how best to allocate time given the many variables, constraints and unforeseeable demands for our time from people and situations, like an emergency.
2. Unclear goals and values. In the face of so many options, it’s not always obvious what we should be doing with our time.  What is important is not always clear.  Preferences and priorities compete for our time.  In the language of decision theory, the utility function — the mathematical value of every action one might take – is not always clearly calculated.  We don’t know what we really want or need.
3. Failure to prioritize. Since we don’t know what we want or need, we can’t prioritize that.  And most of us have a hard time saying “no” when others ask for time… especially small bits of time, such as phone calls, slack messages, text messages, emails, social media messages, water cooler conversations, quick-question interruptions, social interactions, small chores, etc.  Time drains away like water cupped in our hands.
4. Human frailty. In addition to all of those variables that conspire to use up our time, there is also that most unsolvable problem of all:  we are human.  We get tired, feel stressed, procrastinate, seek instant gratification, make mistakes, and seek to do what’s easy as a way to conserve energy.  It’s a survival mechanism, but it causes us to use time less effectively.
5. Too much technology. Technology has exacerbated the time scarcity problem.  Even while we think of technology as saving time and making life easier — allowing us to do things at more times and places than ever before, it also delivers even more possible activities to consider when deciding how to spend our time and it acutely increases the social pressures for our time.  Social media, television and gaming are some of the most obvious time devourers of all.

The point here is that managing and making the most of the time we have is tough.  If a company’s most valuable resource is its employees (which it is), and time is each employee’s most precious resource (which it is), then time is invaluable to every business, and time management is key.

Deliverables and Deadlines

So how do employers manage employee time?  There are certainly a plethora of time management tools – analog and digital – for this.  But, for most employers, a preferred strategy to manage employee time is “deadlines.”  The problem is that most employers are incapable of setting a reasonable deadline for a multitude of tasks that their employees do because they’ve never had to do those tasks themselves.

Case in point.  A creative director at an ad agency might be managing a host of employees including graphic designers, copy writers, artists, photographers, videographers, illustrators, animators, etc.  But that creative director is most likely not skilled at doing all of the tasks that those direct reports do.  So how do deadlines get set?  It is usually either by consensus or in response to a fast-approaching deadline by a publication or campaign roll-out.  Employees are tasked to get the work done in time for the deadline whether it is realistically enough time or not.  Staff are then forced to work long hours and sacrifice personal time to hit the mark.  And often, the justification cited for setting impossibly tight deadlines is Parkinson’s Law.

Is Parkinson’s Law a Law?

So what does Parkinson’s Law state and who is Parkinson?  The principle espoused in Parkinson’s Law has been boiled down to state basically that:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

The concept was put forth by Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson in an article published in The Economist in 1955 who was studying work behaviors in the British Civil Service.   In his essay, Parkinson explained the results of a study done in the British Civil Service.  It became the basis for what is now widely cited as evidence that when given a task, a person will fill whatever time was allotted for its completion.  So, basically, if an assigned project is allotted 4 days, it will take the employees working on it 4 days to complete.  And if the same project were allotted only 2 days for completion, it would be completed in 2 days.

The problem is that that is not what Parkinson said or meant.  A deeper read of Parkinson’s study shows that he was not making a general claim on how people procrastinate, waste time and drag out work. Instead, he was actually summarizing a rather rigorous statistical proof he devised to explain a very specific situation – namely that the number of workers needed to perform tasks in the British Civil Service kept increasing even though the British Empire was actually getting smaller. British Colonial Office bureaucracy increased even as the British Empire imploded.   Parkinson’s Law was a statistical model devised to describe the factors that control the growth of bureaucracy. The central conclusion: growth/increase (of time) is independent of the amount of work to be done.  But it became a catch phrase used to describe a totally different phenomena:  namely that the time it takes to do a job expands to fit the time allocated to the task.  In light of Parkinson’s full findings, the adage that “work expands to fill available time” is incorrect and out of context.  Parkinson likely would be bemused or confused to find that his conclusion about government bureaucracy was being applied to private sector workers doing complex, high-skill tasks.  In reality, what Parkinson was really trying to say is that:

Well-established work cultures can create irrational behaviors that may be inefficient.

In the civil service, this meant that the number of employees needed to get a job done could increase even as work demands decreased.  But this could also be applied to other settings.  For example a college student might embrace an irrational belief that indulging in all-night cram sessions and long study marathons is needed to properly prepare for a test.  However, scientific evidence indicates that the brain needs time after learning new material to transfer it from short-term to long-term memory, which happens during sleep.  So studying all night is actually ineffectual.  However, applying Parkinson’s Law to setting deadlines for work being performed in modern, complex workplaces is an erroneous application of what Parkinson noted.

What’s more, Parkinson’s study was not replicated or validated with other studies in order to deserve the title of “Law”.  In order for a concept to be elevated to the status of “law” – meaning that it is always true – requires much deeper research and confirmation.  This never happened with Parkinson’s work.  So it is not a law, but a concept noted in a very specific scenario.  To quote Parkinson’s Law as justification for setting impossible tight deadlines is not just wrong, but actually counterproductive.

Establishing a false or impossibly tight deadline is actually detrimental to the process of getting work done.  Setting a deadline earlier than necessary, simply because you don’t trust your employees to meet the real deadline, creates more problems than it solves.  Employees will realize that deadlines are padded, and will stop respecting deadlines.  And a project should not be deemed a rush job if the manager sat on it for a long period of time.  Employees will not appreciate being rushed to do a job that could have been done properly in a normal time-frame with adequate planning.

Deadlines Work when Handled Correctly

Deadlines are a useful tool for managing employee time, when used properly.  Here are some tips for setting deadlines to manage employee time.

1. Be specific. Name the target day and time.  And mean it.  If a job is needed by Wednesday, say that instead of “next week.”  Being vague simply creates opportunities for frustration if the employee is asked for the work on Tuesday but thought they had til Friday.  If the work can be turned in the following week, it should be okay for the employee to complete it by 5pm of the following week.  If the work is expected to be sent out by 9am of the following Friday, set the deadline for end of day Thursday.
2. Set priorities. If there are five tasks to be done, identify what is most important to be done first, and then so on.  If an assignment takes precedence over any other projects, say so.  Avoid making every task the top priority that is needed ASAP.  All work cannot be done at the same time.  And different people interpret ASAP differently.  To some, it means ‘drop everything and work overtime.’  To others, it means ‘first finish up what you’re already doing, and then do this.’
3. Establish a schedule and update it regularly. Even the best time management and most diligent workers might have trouble sticking to the schedule.  Plans can go astray.  To minimize the chance of this occurring, set a regular progress report schedule to see how work is progressing.  That might mean having one-on-one meetings to get a status report.  Or it might mean a daily email.  The schedule should be reasonable and convenient for everyone involved. It should make sense in terms of the length and complexity of the job.

Given the tight labor market and the war for talent, helping employees manage their time effectively is one of the most important things a supervisor can do.  Workers will be more engaged and successful at their jobs if they are achieving results.  No one wants to feel constantly pressured to produce quality work within impossibly tight time frames, and Parkinson’s Law does not apply to today’s workplace reality.

Quote of the Week

“Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.” Carl Sandburg

© 2021, Keren Peters-Atkinson. All rights reserved.