Parkinson's Law
Parkinson's Law is named after Cyril Parkinson, a British naval historian who had spent a large amount of his time with the British Civil Service. As a British staff officer in World War II, he observed the numerous inefficiencies caused by a large bureaucracy. He noticed that the British Colonial Office increased year after year even though the British Empire was in decline. Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
This law says that any task is prolonged until the time available for doing it is completely exhausted. It is also a law of productivity. We think that the more hours we dedicate to something, the better it is. But practice shows that it is not like that. When we know we have more time, our brain relaxes. On the other hand, when we feel the pressure of the deadline, we focus on doing what is important and that we must finish on time. What does this mean at the User Experience level? The user establishes certain temporary rules, depending on the type of user obviously, but to give an example, making a purchase on Amazon has a duration of 5 minutes Anything shortening those deadlines will be positive.
Cyril Parkinson coined his observation to describe the inefficiencies of bureaucracies. Distilled to its simplest form, it’s about how we're unable to manage ourselves as well as we would like. In the digital age where our attention is constantly divided, we would do well to utilize Parkinson's law to safeguard our most valuable resource, time.