People get cast in molds (of status and roles) for which they are variously equipped. The problem lies between man’s creativeness and diversity and the rather specific needs of his institutions, for most cultures and the institutions they engender represent highly specialized solutions to rather specific problems. For example, in England during the early days of the industrial revolution, villagers and field hands were brought into the factory to work. These first generations of mill hands were not conditioned to the whistle. Like all preindustrial peoples, when they earned enough to pay off their debts and keep them for a while they quit and went home. This situation could have continued indefinitely if there had not been a hidden trap— children.
There were no child labor laws and no one to care for the children at home, so the children worked with the parents in the factory and became imprinted by the whistle. They then brought up their own children accordingly.
Edward Hall was an American anthropologist who pioneered the study of intercultural communication. He spent a lifetime watching how institutions tame human variety. Hall worked on groundbreaking concepts, including proxemics (how different cultures use physical space), chronemics (distinguishing between monochronic clock-driven schedules and polychronic multi-tasking approaches to time), and high-context versus low-context cultures (how much meaning cultures embed in context versus explicit words), to show that what feels “natural” is sometimes just training.
Hall argues that in early industrial England, the first generation of mill hands worked until their debts were paid, then went home. But their children, with no laws to protect them, became “imprinted by the whistle”, carrying its rigid rhythm forward through generations. The cumulative effect of institutional demands (like, in his example, factory schedules) leads to a mechanical and monotonous environment, where genuine human diversity, spontaneity, and creativity are squashed, leading ultimately to …
Man has put himself in his own zoo. He has so simplified his life and stereotyped his responses that he might as well be in a cage.
Of course, Hall wrote the book in 1976, so we can argue that things have changed. And changed they did, as today, the whistle has shrunk to a pocket-sized ping, with a grip tighter than ever.
But let’s return to Hall’s mills. First comes the factory whistle; then, roughly a century later, arrives Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a British naval historian who, while serving in the WII and post-war Civil Service, began jotting a curious paradox in his notebook: Britain was shedding ships, yet the Admiralty kept adding clerks; the Empire was contracting, while the Colonial Office staff list grew longer.
But his “aha” came during a spell at the War Office: when Parkinson’s immediate superiors were away on leave, he found he cleared his work faster, even though, on paper, he now had more to do. The absence of extra layers of oversight removed the slow, circular memos and signatures that normally clogged the day. That small observation,
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
eventually became the famous Parkinson’s Law.
Parkinson’s insight is social and individual. Whenever an institution can add more grease to its schedule or its payroll, it will. Give a task an afternoon, it takes an afternoon; give it a month, it takes a month. Anecdotally, when Italian politician Alessandro Natta complained about the ever-growing bureaucracy in Italy, the Russian politician Mikhail Gorbachev responded that “Parkinson’s law works everywhere.”
The modern, pocket-sized ping means that Parkinson’s dynamic changes to unlimited availability breed an unlimited task list. Since we are “on” all the time in this perma-connected world, work (not just paid labour but any demand on attention) seems to occupy every waking hour.
No wonder that we wish for
Send me a slow news day,
a quiet, subdued day,
in which nothing much happens of note,
just the passing of time,
the consumption of wine,
and a re-run of Murder, She Wrote.
Grant me a no news day,
a spare-me-your-views day,
in which nothing much happens at all –
a few hours together,
some regional weather,
a day we can barely recall.
And this was the direction I had in mind for this article. To begin this article with Parkinson’s law, and then let the text flow to exploring fertile emptiness, those hours when the mind can wander and wonder alike. A little ideation on meaningful rest, sprinkled with some well-chosen quotes, and the piece would practically write itself. In fact, I gave myself a Parkinson-approved deadline: three hours to finish, because, as we know, the work for an article expands to fill the time available for its publication.
Alas, it wasn’t so. Parkinson’s Law rests on shakier ground than its widespread acceptance suggests. Despite being cited in everything from productivity guides to medical journals, and becoming shorthand for bureaucratic inefficiency, the foundational research behind this principle has serious methodological errors that undermine its credibility.
In 1994, Jon Sumida published in Naval History Magazine what remains the most thorough scholarly demolition of Parkinson’s famous case study, using Parkinson’s own Admiralty data to expose fundamental flaws in his reasoning.
The problems began with basic methodology. Parkinson never disclosed his sources, and the numbers Sumida considered in his report
actually strengthens the case that Parkinson wanted to make, because the percentage increase [of British Admiralty officials] between 1914 and 1928 as a consequence rises from 78 to 120.
More damaging still,
Parkinson did not state explicitly that no other force could have caused this phenomenon, except his law. He achieved this tacitly, simply by not mentioning the existence of a cataclysmic event that had occurred between 1914 and 1928, which had disturbed, transformed, or in some cases even destroyed, virtually every major governmental institution in Europe. This momentous happening was, of course, World War I.
as Sumida noted with barely concealed incredulity.
When Sumida explored further, he found that Parkinson had mistaken chronic understaffing for efficiency. From 1900 to 1914, the British Admiralty faced an explosion in administrative complexity (fleet expansion, technological revolution), generating “unprecedented quantities of reports, memoranda, contracts, and other forms of writing”. Rather than bureaucratic bloat, the post-war expansion represented a necessary correction.
More intriguingly, it reflected a fundamental shift in the nature of work itself. By 1918, over half the Admiralty’s clerical staff were women. Sumida sardonically remarks that this tendency to hire women was not in fact what Admiralty officials wanted.
The board had concluded its reply, as the story goes, with the perhaps unfortunately worded pronouncement that ‘their Lordships cannot conceal their decided preference for the boys.
But considering that after World War I, the British Army also had a “decided preference” for men, the British Navy had to make use of what they could find. And to no one’s surprise, women were hired at lower wages than men, which meant that despite increased personnel, per capita Navy administrative costs fell by more than 25%.
But most fascinating was the idea of defensive bureaucratization. World War I transformed conflict from a confrontation between armies into a contest of industrial economies. The British Admiralty did not expand only because of internal bloat but it grew to compete with the British Army’s Ministry of Munitions for scarce industrial resources and human talent.
Sumida concludes his article that Parkinson’s observations were valid, as tasks do grow to fill the time available, and bureaucracies often stretch. But their causes are usually complex, and no single principle can universally codify historical realities. In the case of Parkinson’s Law, genuine technological complexity (WWI’s industrial demands), competitive pressure (inter-ministry rivalry for resources), and sweeping social change (the gender revolution that reshaped labour supply and costs) all complicate any single “law.” In Sumida’s words, “Almost everything is political, and politics matters.”
If content is king, then context is everything. And so, coming back to my original plan for this article, is it possible to continue its original vein, writing an article about wishing for a “slow news day”?
Undoubtedly, because the moment I came across Sumida’s article, the whistle stopped blowing. And the timer stopped.
I remembered Edward Hall (who saw context everywhere) and his ideas of monochronic versus polychronic time. Monochronic time (factory whistles, Outlook calendars, team sprints) assumes that time is a grid of uniform slots to be filled one after another. Punctuality is a virtue, overlap is an error, and efficiency is measured in tasks crossed off. Polychronic time (Hawaiian time, many Mediterranean siestas, the unhurried flow of a family kitchen) treats time as fluid and relational. Several activities may mingle; people, not clocks, set the pace; arriving “late” is only late relative to a schedule that was never meant to be rigid.
Consider the Hawaiian culture, which has two time systems: Haole time and Hawaiian time.
“See you at two o’clock haole time” means exactly that: people will meet at two o’clock. But “I’ll be there at two o’clock Hawaiian time” means something different because Hawaiian time is lax. “Two o’clock Hawaiian time” might be 2:15, 2:30, or whenever everyone naturally arrives.
Hall’s point was never that one system is superior. The monochronic mindset maximises output but also amplifies Parkinson’s Law. The polychronic mindset rewards
“nothing much happens of note,
just the passing of time,
the consumption of wine,
and a re-run of Murder, She Wrote.”
So when my neat outline collapsed, I switched clocks. And I did wander and I did wonder and somehow, refilled the well. Only then is it possible to have this article arrive at its final shape, not when the timer decides, but on Hawaiian time, when the argument, the writer, and the reader arrive together, no more, no less.
Note:
It took me about five hours to write this article.