C. Northcote Parkinson Quotes

Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

A luxury, once enjoyed, becomes a necessity.

The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel and misrepresentation.

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” —Cyril Northcote Parkinson

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law. But it’s not merely a joke, and it doesn’t apply only to work. It applies to everything that needs doing. In fact, it’s the definition of “what needs doing” that expands to fill the time available.

Writing in 1954, the British author C. Northcote Parkinson introduced the notion that work expands to fill the time allocated for it, now known as Parkinson’s Law. If you didn’t know that few managers receive any management training at all, you might think there was a school they all went to for an intensive course on Parkinson’s Law and its ramifications. Even managers that know they know nothing about management nonetheless cling to that one axiomatic truth governing people and their attitude toward work: Parkinson’s Law. It gives them the strongest possible conviction that the only way to get work done at all is to set an impossibly optimistic delivery date. Parkinson

The same goes for chores: in her book More Work for Mother, the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows that when housewives first got access to “labor-saving” devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits; now that you could return each of your husband’s shirts to a spotless condition after a single wearing, it began to feel like you should, to show how much you loved him. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law. But it’s not merely a joke, and it doesn’t apply only to work. It applies to everything that needs doing. In fact, it’s the definition of “what needs doing” that expands to fill the time available.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in 1955, coining what became known as Parkinson’s law. But

Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.

In 1955, a modern philosopher named C. Northcote Parkinson came up with the counterintuitive Parkinson’s Law: that the demand for something expands to match its supply. In economics, this is called induced demand—it’s why expanding roads to reduce traffic congestion never works in the long term because more drivers always show up in their cars to fill those extra lanes.

Yet “perfection,” as C. Northcote Parkinson shrewdly noted, “is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.