An empty afternoon is not a gift. Hand someone the afternoon and the smallest errand will spend it. The search for the postcard, the spectacles, the address and the umbrella will occupy every minute you made available. The person was not idle. The errand grew.
C. Northcote Parkinson set the observation down in Parkinson's Law, the chapter he called the rising pyramid. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. An elderly lady of leisure can spend a day writing a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour finding the card, another hunting for spectacles, half an hour on the address, an hour and a quarter on the composition and twenty minutes deciding whether to take an umbrella to the post box. A busy person, he says, would have done the lot in three minutes. The total effort did not change. The slot did.
Seven people, one reply
He then applies the same elasticity to a staff. An official, A, feels overworked. Whether the load is real does not matter. A will not resign, because that costs the pension. A will not split the work with a peer, B, because B becomes a rival for the next promotion. A appoints two juniors, C and D. One junior would have shared the work and become almost an equal. Two can be kept in order by the fear of each other's promotion. When C later complains, A advises two assistants for C and, to keep the peace, two for D. Seven officials now do what one did.
The seven make work for each other until everyone is occupied and A is working harder than before. A paper moves from hand to hand. A, conscientious, reads it in the evening, cuts the fussy paragraphs and restores the reply one able person had drafted first. It is the letter A would have written if the other six had never been hired. Far more people have taken far longer to produce the same result. Nobody was idle. The lights go off as A heads for Ealing.
The navy on land
Parkinson takes the figures from the Navy Estimates, because ships and people can be counted. In 1914 there were 146,000 officers and men, 2,000 Admiralty officials and 62 capital ships. By 1928 there were 100,000 officers and men, 3,569 Admiralty officials and fewer than 20 capital ships. The fleet had fallen by about a third in men and by two-thirds in ships. From 1922 the Washington Naval Agreement limited the ships. It did not limit the officials. The Colonial Office is the cleaner case, because the empire was shrinking. Staff went from 372 in 1935 to 1,661 in 1954, through years when territories were lost and then gained self-government. He treats the rise as unrelated to the quantity of work, including the case where the work disappears.
What a tips session gives away
A weak proposal teaches a personal method and leaves the slot the same length. The postcard still has the afternoon. It also leaves the handoffs in place, so the reply still visits seven people on the way to the person who could have written it. You have hired C and D and called it focus. The finding you are buying is narrower. One block of time, made shorter. One document, finished by the person who owns the reply, without the tour.
Collective Campus has done capability building for teams since 2015. The productivity workshop is for a team that can name one block of time and is allowed to make it shorter. What an interruption does around that block is in how to judge the day for a busy team. What one poor meeting is doing inside it is in how to judge the day by the meeting it keeps. Habits that have to outlast the first week are in turning bad habits into good ones.
What to bring
Bring one block of time that always fills, and one document that passes through more people than it needs. If the afternoon is sacred and every handoff is required, the postcard will take whatever you give it.
