Parkinson's Law: An antidote to long meetings
“Geez, I love meetings! If only they could go on for longer.”
- No one in the world, ever.
The biggest downside of work from home has been the explosion in meetings (important disclaimer: in general, I love work from home). What used to be a quick office discussion, now requires a virtual meeting that usually lasts at least 30 minutes. Like Britain protecting its island against Nazi invasion, the battle to keep your diary clean of the ongoing bombardment of meeting requests is a job in itself. As per the famous slogan from the poster produced by the British government to raise morale during the war: “Keep Calm and Carry On”.
Why are meetings booked in 30-minute increments as default and miraculously take as long as the time scheduled for them? Is it because we are master schedulers? The answer to that is an easy, “no”.
In 1955, British naval historian and author Cyril Northcote Parkinson shared an idea in an essay in The Economist that has since been branded Parkinson’s Law, i.e.:
“It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
The idea is simple: if you set aside a year/month/week/day/hour to get something done, it will probably take a year/month/week/day/hour to do. If you don’t want to work after hours or weekends, odds are you would get your work done during regular hours if you knew that overtime wasn’t an option. Obviously, you won’t be able to build a house in a day, but I can almost guarantee that you can do the next two-hour meeting you have diarised in less than one hour.
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