A law that began as a joke
In 1955, the British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson opened an article in The Economist with this sentence: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." It began as a satire of British administration, not a law established in a lab. But every project manager recognizes the mechanism: a two-hour task, given two weeks, ends up taking the two weeks.
What the research says
The "law" itself has not been tested directly, but a solid theoretical framework explains the phenomenon: Temporal Motivation Theory (Steel, 2007). It shows that motivation varies inversely with perceived delay: the further away the deadline seems, the more the felt value of immediate work collapses. Focus drops, and the remaining time fills up with needless perfectionism, hesitation and side tasks.
This also feeds procrastination, a mechanism we detail in Why Do We Procrastinate on Projects?.
Two strategies to get around the bias
- Time-boxing: give each task a strict, short block of time. The nearby deadline restores a healthy sense of urgency, and perfectionism has no room to settle in.
- Short sprints: in agile, cycles of one to two weeks keep the deadline constantly in view. That is the whole point of the Scrum sprint.
One caveat: shortening deadlines does not excuse you from estimating them well. An unrealistic deadline has the opposite effect (stress, discouragement). To estimate properly, read our article on estimation biases.
In FluidOps
Break the goal into short cards in the Kanban, pace them in sprints with an explicit goal, and keep deadlines in sight in the Gantt, where late tasks are circled.
Sources
- Parkinson, C. N. (1955). Parkinson's Law. The Economist, 19 November 1955. [PDF]
- Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65-94. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
- Steel, P., & König, C. J. (2006). Integrating theories of motivation. Academy of Management Review, 31(4), 889-913. doi:10.5465/amr.2006.22527462