Parkinson’s Law
The report of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service was published on Thursday afternoon. Time has not permitted any comment in this week’s issue of The Economist on the contents of the Report. But the startling discovery enunciated by a correspondent in the following article is certainly relevant to what should have been in it.
Editor’s note (July 2020): In this essay from 1955 C. Northcote Parkinson described and defined the natural tendency for officials to make more work for each other. The charts have been updated to fit the website
IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.