Parkinson's Law and Quality - DBR 047
Ever feel like you didn’t get much done? Like you were kind of stuck in the mud most of the day? Ever said: “The work just wouldn’t get done”? I ran across Parkinson’s Law on a podcast from Cal Newport and Adam Grant. You may not know it by that name, but you probably heard the Law. Parkinson's Law: the work expands to fill the time available. Cal actually turns it into a thought about his notion of obsessing over quality. While I love him generally, I think his advice there is not applicable to most of our environments. In fact, I think quality is the problem, not the solution. Here’s my take on applying Parkinson’s Law. That is, on fighting it. When I was in Ph.D. school we had to write papers. I used the tactics I had learned in my previous schooling, but I was spending WAY too much time. I decided to experiment and found out that I could get the same results in half the time or less. I’ll tell you what I did in a little while. I think the Law is true. I think we tend to apply it to other people and dismiss it as a joke, but I think it also happens in our own work and in our own lives. I don’t think it’s trivial; I think it can be a pretty big waste and I don’t think it’s inevitable. Today we'll talk about what some of the mechanisms for that are. In attention compass, we talk about time boxing as the antidote to Parkinson’s Law. Note: Time boxing is not hyper-precise and hyper-detailed scheduling. I'll get to it in a minute. What is Parkinson’s Law - background
- Not just other people
- We can see ourselves do it too
- Corollaries – Stokes-Stanford “if you wait ‘til the last minute, it’ll only take a minute to do”
- Corollaries – Horstman’s corollary “the work contracts to fit the time we give it”
So we want the corollaries, not the law
- Quick aside: what do you think ‘gives’ when the corollaries kick in? – more later
Our school environment encourages Parkinson’s law
- I think the school environment is quite impactful on our work styles
- The nature of school tasks
- School tasks have vague requirements
- School – practice tests? Nope – so lack of feedback
- Making good grades doesn’t appear to correlate closely with ‘ability to learn’ in other contexts
- So, we need to be very careful about assuming that we developed good work habits while we were in school
- That is: “good grades” = “good student” = “did the work well” “good at learning”
- Your school task environment
- during your school years, you don't have many, let's say, non work responsibilities typically
- So, its hard to justify anything other than studying – completely unlike the workplace
- these work habits lead us to Parkinson's Law – look busy
Summary so far
- We get the law, not the corollaries. But we'd prefer to have the corollaries.
- Our primary learning environments teach us Parkison’s law, not good work habits
- Back to Horstman’s commentary – underlying for time boxing – can we meaningfully ‘shrink the time available’? Yes
- That is, we can identify the things that ‘expand’ and see about not letting them do so
Work ‘expansion’
- Let’s be clear about expansion – I’m not talking about interruption, multitasking and distraction here
- What are the mechanisms of work “expansion”?
- “quality” traces back to the school environment
- The work world is a “best effort” kind of place - usually
- This is “the only” way to judge the quality of our work - effort
- A “poor quality tax return”
- If you’re a specialist, you’re the local expert on quality
- Abstract example – the boss ONLY can say ‘good enough’ – ‘Stop spending,
- I can defend that’
- ‘double checking’ - math vs. other skills
- Doing the same thing over
Published on 1 year ago