Law of Triviality
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In a 1955 essay published in The Economist, author Cyril Northcote Parkinson introduced a novel theory of bureaucracy and management by writing, “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
This essay was eventually reprinted a few years later, alongside other works, in a book entitled Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress.
In this later work, Parkinson expounded upon that original idea, explaining it through the lens of his experience in the British Civil Service, and arguing, using employee and production numbers that, first, officials behave in ways that allow them to increase their number of subordinates rather than rivals, and second, officials tend to create more work for each other.
He also noted that the number of people employed in a bureaucracy increases by 5-7% each year, regardless of how much work there is to be done.
The most common truncation of this concept, today—an adage called Parkinson’s Law, which has been promoted by entrepreneurs and lifehackers of various stripes—is that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Or said another way: the amount of time you have available to do something is the amount of time it will take to do that thing.
The takeaway being that, typically, our perception of how much time it will take to accomplish something is influenced by the deadline attached to that task.
If we have a day to write a paper, we’ll get it done in a day. If we have two weeks in which to write it, we’ll take two weeks. Our conception of what shape the paper should take and the amount of work we should put into it expands as the time available expands.
Our work ethic can also be shaped by our perception of the deadline, it’s been posited, which is why some people artificially shorten their deadlines so as to get more done in less time. You have two weeks to write that paper, but if you decide to only give yourself one day, you’ll get it done in 1/14 the time and avoiding waiting till the last minute to finish it.
Parkinson’s writings yielded several other popular takeaways alongside this one—many of which also ended up encapsulated as bite-sized adages.
One such insight is often called Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, and states that people in organizations often grant outsized weight and consideration to unimportant issues.
This informal law of human nature is sometimes called the bike shed effect, referring to an example provided in the aforementioned book.
Parkinson wrote that a committee tasked with approving the plans for a nuclear power plant will sometimes spend substantially more of their time discussing and debating the building of a bicycle shed for which they’re also responsible than they will the nuclear power plant.
He argued that this was the case because more people have experience with, and thus, experienced-based opinions about, simple, relatively inconsequential, and normal things—like bike sheds.
In contrast, comparably few people will have any real experience with, and thus, strong opinions about, the specifics of nuclear power plant construction. There will no doubt be opinions, but not of the lived, experience-based kind that are more likely to stoke tensions and roil the emotions of committee members.
As a result, relatively important issues like the specifics of building a nuclear power plant are often less discussed and debated, less questioned and measured, than the building of something arguably far less vital.
We often see this tendency in groups of people, but it originates in how we behave as individuals.
Our focus tends to prioritize that which stimulates the most emotional resonance, and as a result, we often fixate on things that make us happy or sad, scared or outraged, angry or anxious, while spending less of our time and attention on arguably more vital things that trigger fewer emotions—and for which we have less firsthand experience.
It’s possible to develop heuristics that can help us counter this tendency, but even having an awareness of the issue, it can be difficult in the moment to extract ourselves from our fixation on things that are laughably unimportant compared to the other things we might focus on, instead.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t an argument against groups, or against paying attention to issues that stoke emotional responses: it’s a reminder that our perception of the relative importance of things can be distorted by our emotions, and when we’re aggregated into groups, such distortions can be amplified; sometimes with less-than-ideal outcomes.
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