Parkinson's Law

"Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." This law was discovered by C. Northcote Parkinson and is documented in his books Parkinson's Law and Mrs Parkinson's law, and other studies in domestic science. Several other laws have been attributed to Parkinson, these include:

• Parkinson's First Law: Work expands to fill the time available.
• Parkinson's Second Law: Expenditures rise to meet income.
• Parkinson's Third Law: Expansion means complexity; and complexity decay.
• Parkinson's Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.
• Parkinson's Fifth Law: If there is a way to delay an important decision the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.
• Parkinson's Law of Sience: The progress of science varies inversely with the number of journals published.
• Parkinson's Law of Delay: Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
• Parkinson's Law of Data: Data expands to fill the space available.
• Parkinson's Law of Meetings: The time spent in a meeting on an item is inversely propotional to its value (up to a limit).
• Parkinson's Law of 1000: An enterprise employing more than 1000 people becomes a self-perpetuating empire, creating so much internal work that it no longer needs any contact with the outside world.
• Mrs. Parkinson's Law: Heat produced by pressure expands to fill the mind available, from which it can pass only to a cooler mind.

  Some of this has been sourced by numerous web pages.

Parkinson was not just coming up with funny laws -- the law that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” was based on real research. Apparently, a study that found that as the number of ships in the Royal Navy sharply declined after World War I, the number of office and dockyard employees sharply increased. The law was first published in 1955 and produced international renown for Parkinson, then the Raffles Professor of History at the University of Malaya.