Parkinson's Law

Parkinson's Law is the title of a satirical essay by the naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson, first published in The Economist in 1955, which distilled two observations about administrative work into a durable behavioral principle: that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion, and that the administrative staff of an organization tends to grow regardless of how much work there actually is to do. Parkinson attributed the second finding to what he called the law of multiplication of subordinates and the law of multiplication of work, describing how officials tend to want more subordinates rather than rivals and then generate enough work between them to justify their own growth. Although the essay was written as satire, its first observation, that work expands to fill the time allotted, is the meaning most commonly intended today, and both findings have since been taken up seriously in management science and organizational psychology. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/