Parkinson's Law: Master time management and increase productivity
By 50minutes
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About this ebook
This book is a practical and accessible guide to understanding and implementing Parkinson’s Law, providing you with the essential information and saving time.
In 50 minutes you will be able to:
• Understand the three statements that Parkinson used to develop the law and assess whether they apply to your staff
• Use Parkinson’s formula to calculate the growth rate of your organization and analyze the rate compared to the workload
• Avoid employing staff unnecessarily and learn how to better control the time they spend completing set tasks
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Book preview
Parkinson's Law - 50minutes
Key information
Name: Parkinson’s Law.
Uses: public management, administration, public services, human resource management.
Why is it successful? It is a humorous, but very compelling, theory on the propensity of administration to grow, regardless of the amount of work required.
Key words: civil servant, administration, working time, public management, bureaucracy.
Introduction
Shattering traditional ideas of working time, Parkinson’s Law humorously emphasises the functioning of bureaucratic administration in the second half of the 20th century.
Full of British humour, and from a period when the perverse effects of the bureaucracy were being condemned (think of the famous novel 1984 by George Orwell, published in 1949), Cyril Northcote Parkinson (1909-1993), a British historian, published an article presenting Parkinson’s Law in 1955. The law states that amount of civil service staff grows at a given rate (produced by an imaginative mathematical formula), regardless of the amount of work there is to do.
Definition of the concept
Parkinson’s Law is based on three statements:
a person with a job to do will use all of the time available