The size of the container

Work knows how to fill the time allotted to it.

Cyril Northcote Parkinson published his formula about work expanding to fill the time available for it in 1955 as a satirical observation in The Economist. He began with the story of an elderly lady for whom sending a postcard to her niece turned into a whole day’s occupation: find the card, hunt down the glasses, choose the address, decide whether to take an umbrella to the postbox.

Parkinson was writing about bureaucracy, not discovering a law of physics. But the metaphor proved durable, because a deadline really does change the scale of permissible work. A large container is not obliged to fill up — it simply offers the contents the opportunity.

If two weeks were given for the preparation, it tends to take two weeks — even though there is two days of actual work in it. The first twelve days go on grasping the scale of the task, finding suitable music, rearranging files and cautiously approaching the subject. Then comes the evening when a person suddenly discovers in themselves a capacity for total concentration.

This does not mean short deadlines are always good. A shortage of time makes decisions worse, squeezes out checking and forces you to take the first acceptable solution instead of the best one. But an excessive deadline is not neutral either: the task spreads, acquires unnecessary steps and often still ends in a rush.

So it is worth distinguishing:

• the official deadline;
• your own working deadline;
• the reserve for mistakes;
• the point after which improvement no longer justifies the cost.

If the report is due on Friday, the working deadline can be Wednesday. Thursday is left for checking, other people’s comments and the discovery that one of the source files was called final_final_new2.

A time boundary helps not only to start but to finish. Without one a text can be edited forever, a calculation refined further, and a flat prepared for the moment when living in it is finally permitted.

A task needs a container of the right size. Too small and it will spill. Too large and it will take over the whole cupboard.

The easiest place to check this is housework. Cleaning before guests due at seven takes exactly as long as is left until seven: with three free hours a person wipes the skirting boards and sorts out the drawer of cables; with forty minutes they sweep the excess into the bedroom and close the door. The guest barely notices the difference. What is worse is this: with three hours the last forty minutes are still spent rushing, only by then the skirting boards have been added.

So a working deadline is better set from the volume of work than from the calendar. The question is not “when is it due” but “how much work is there here if nothing gets decorated”. The difference between those two numbers is the reserve that will either become checking or be eaten by skirting boards.