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Parkinson’s Law
Naval Historian C. Northcote Parkinson described two observations
- work expands so as to fill the available time for its completion
- the number of workers within public admin, bureaucracy, or officialdom tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work done. This is because officials want subordinates and not rivals, and officials make work for each other.
Corollaries:
- If you wait until last minute, it only takes a minute to do.
- Work contracts to fit the time you give it.
- In ten hours a day you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as in a five hour day.
- Data expands to fill the space available for storage.
Generalized
The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource (If the price is zero).
Law of triviality (bike-shedding)
People within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.
Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.
The terms bicycle-shed effect, bike-shed effect, and bike-shedding were coined based on Parkinson’s example;
A simple explanation is that during the process of making a decision, one has to assess whether enough information has been collected to make the decision. If people make mistakes about whether they have enough information, then they will tend to feel overwhelmed by large and complex matters and stop collecting information too early to adequately inform their big decisions. The reason is that big decisions require collecting information for a long time and working hard to understand its complex ramifications. This leaves more of an opportunity to make a mistake (and stop) before getting enough information. Conversely, for small decisions, where people should devote little attention and act without hesitation, they may inefficiently continue to ponder for too long, partly because they are better able to understand the subject.