Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
Parkinson’s law is one of two observations made by the naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson in a 1955 satirical essay:
- Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
- The number of workers within public administration tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done.
The essay starts by mentioning the first sense as a “commonplace observation”, and the bulk of the essay discusses the second, which is what Parkinson winkingly dubs Parkinson’s Law. The first has been called the “personal version” of the law and the second, which is not stated explicitly, the “organizational version”.
It is the first sense which is now most commonly called Parkinson’s Law.
The essay is written as satire in response to the report of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service, which had been issued two days earlier. Despite its facetious origins, it has been widely adopted in management science and social psychology.