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Enjoying Your Work Richard Brislin |
Parkinson’s law says
work will expand to fill
available timeWhen he was host of television's "Tonight Show," Johnny Carson tried to ensure that the show would have large amounts of spontaneous behavior. He felt that audiences liked to see the unpredictable in his interactions with his guests and in his responses to on-the-spot groans after unsuccessful jokes.
Given this preference, rehearsals for any one "Tonight Show" episode might take no more than one hour. A reporter once asked him, "Why don't you increase rehearsal time for each show? I should think this would make for better-prepared guests, better sound for the musical acts and more jokes that audiences find funny." In his response, Johnny Carson used just two words: "Parkinson's law."
This law describing human behavior, formulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson, states that work expands to fill the time available. In the case of the "Tonight Show," Johnny Carson felt that he could put on a good show with one hour of solid work during rehearsal. But Parkinson's law states that if there were six hours of rehearsal, the same amount of work would expand to fill this larger time slot. People would slow down their normal pace of work. They would rehearse musical numbers three or four times but would not noticeably improve the final product. More jokes would be tried out, but the resulting collection would not be funnier.
Put another way, there would be a great deal of "busy work" added so that six hours of rehearsal time would be filled. Executives would probably hire another assistant just to schedule time slots within six-hour rehearsals. Carson felt that the strong possibility of busy work, and a person to supervise it, would be poor use of resources and so kept to the one-hour rehearsal policy.
Parkinson's law can be seen in many types of organizations. A colleague told me recently of a meeting of her church's advisory board. She said, "There was only about a half-hour of work to be done. But the meeting was scheduled to run for two hours, and so the full two hours was filled. People brought up issues and old stories that had nothing to do with the current administration of the church." Given their social skills, people might not show boredom and displeasure during the two-hour meeting. However, they might invent a convenient excuse and avoid coming to the next meeting, fearing that it would be a poor use of their time.
Recently, Parkinson's law has been applied to information technology, especially personal and office computers. It states, "Data expands to fill the space available for storage." When people have large amounts of storage space, they become careless and expand the information they choose to keep. Useless e-mail messages from five years ago are saved. Teenagers' computer games that they have outgrown still take up storage space. People do not take the trouble to learn how to use efficient data compression programs since there seems to be no limit to what they can store. Similar to the "Tonight Show" possibility, organizations sometimes have to hire a computer specialist to help people manage access to their constantly expanding data.
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The purpose of this column is to increase understanding of human behavior as it has an impact on the workplace. Given the amount of time people spend at work, job satisfaction should ideally be high and it should contribute to general life happiness. Enjoyment can increase as people learn more about workplace psychology, communication, and group influences.
Richard Brislin is a professor in the College of Business Administration, University of Hawaii. He can be reached through the College Relations Office: cro@cba.hawaii.edu