Parkinson's Law: The Paradox of Plenty

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Work expands to fill the resources available. The more you make, the more you spend. Stuff expands to fill the space available for storage. If you want something done, give it to a busy person, etc.

Why

I think this has to do with the long tail and the Pareto principle, which states you get 80% of the value with 20% of the work. Without resource constraints (or the deliberate focus on opportunity cost), you won’t stop even though you are long past the point of diminishing returns. Slightly related concepts are ‘sunk cost fallacy’, ‘bike shedding’, ‘IKEA effect’, ‘loss aversion’.

Relation to Procrastination

Relation to the Dip

Mitigation in General

Decide ahead of time the stopping criteria

Set a budget first

Focus on trade-offs

Mitigating at work

Amazon’s Leadership Principle - Frugality

I think Frugality is Amazon’s least understood Leadership Principle. Many people think it’s about saving $100 by buying a door desk (by the way, door desks end up being more expensive as they are not reusable given they have been ‘cut’ to size), it is, in fact, about building something with 5 people when you think you have 8.

This prevents you from focusing on anything but the high order bit.

Lean Startup

Minimum Viable Products

There is no truth in the building

Ship before you are ready

Day 2 culture

Mitigating at the bank

This applies to money

Pay yourself first

Focus on your expenses, not on your income

Focus on your recurring expenses, not on capital expenses

Mitigating on vacation

This applies during time off

Mitigating in the closet

The art of tidying up

If you go into your closet and take out a few things, you end up in Zeno’s paradox. You’ll continue to take out half the stuff, but you’ll never get there. In contrast, the way to clean your closet is to take everything out and only put back things you absolutely must have.

Funny other variants

From Wikipedia

  • Work complicates to fill the available time.
  • Work contracts to fit in the time we give it.
  • Data expands to fill the space available for storage.
  • In ten hours a day, you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as in five hours a day.
  • If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.