Article

Parkinson's Law It's Real, So Use It

James Stanier

Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Although it is counter-intuitive, you will find that through practice and experience, there is a lot of truth to this. Projects that don’t have deadlines imposed on them, even if they are self-imposed, will take a lot longer than they need to, and may suffer from feature creep and scope bloat.
three key constraints of a project: • Scope, which is the work that needs to be completed. • Resources, which are the people and tools that are available to do the work. • Time is, unsurprisingly, the amount of time that you have to get it done. Who’d have thought?
You can’t change one without affecting the others. For example, if you want to do more work, then you’re either going to need more people or more time. It’s the embodiment of the “pick two” rule: you can have it good, fast, or cheap, but you can’t have all three
With no deadline, there’s no urgency, and so things just don’t happen. So