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 an entire day in writing and dispatching 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.
Some management works should be read once a year. Such is the case with "Parkinson's Law" by C. Northcote Parkinson. Read the rest of the essay here.
2 comments:
Complete. And I have never read the actual article so once again you have performed a service.
Brilliant:
"He reads through the draft with care, deletes the fussy
paragraphs added by C and H and restores the thing back to the form preferred in the first
instance by the able (if quarrelsome) F. He corrects the English-none of these young men
can write grammatically-and finally produces the same reply he would have written if
officials C to H had never been born."
I'm glad you liked it.
It is a truly insightful essay.
Michael
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