Kenny Malone

So the first thing she told me was that Parkinson's Law started out as a joke.

That's Meng Zhu of the Johns Hopkins Business School.

In 1955, The Economist published Parkinson's essay as a kind of facetious argument.

In it, he talked about why bureaucracies almost always grow no matter how much work they're really doing.

I actually found some archival tape of the now deceased Professor Parkinson talking about the essay.

Nice, man.

Somehow you found someone that is more British than Professor Charles Goodhart.

This is very impressive.

That actually came off a 1960 vinyl album called Professor C. Northcote Parkinson Explains Parkinson's Law.

The blurb on the cover calls it, quote, delightfully unprofessorial.

Meng says that Parkinson's article was mostly about why bureaucracies grow, but the thing that really stuck with people, that really made it a big deal, was the opening line.

Mank says that even though it started as a joke, by the 1960s, people were actually treating this like a real law.

So you had psychologists and economists coming up with experiments in the laboratory to try and figure out if people would expand their work to fit changing deadlines.

It seemed like they actually did.

And then you had other people going out and trying to find Parkinson's law in the wild.

Meng and her colleagues have actually studied this.

And sure enough, they found that when they gave their subjects longer deadlines, they expanded the work to fit those deadlines.

And she says that by now, Parkinson's law has become a storied part of cubicle lore.

How do you fight Parkinson's law?

Well, she says there are a few ways.