The law states that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Have you experienced this phenomenon?
A better question is have you seen employees who are given an assignment with plenty of time to complete it, but still manage to only get it to you barely on time, or even late? This is the Parkinson's Law in action.
Your employee newsletter is a magical tool to educate employees about productivity principles like this one within a workplace wellness context. Improving productivity, reducing stress, sharing the information with others, and having a chuckle or two are exciting reasons to educate your employees about productivity laws that cleverly (more so than others) define our lives.
A bit of research on productivity laws discovers that there are actually nine different productivity laws commonly cited in time management literature and personnel management training. You've heard of Murphy's Law. It happens to be one of these nine.
In the future, I will share more about these laws of cause and effect with you, but the employee newsletter article idea I would like to recommend is composing a simple article on this topic right now. Make it about 100-120 word range. Remember, it is my recommendation that you never have employee newsletter articles that extend beyond 250 words, and keep most in the range of 120-150 words.
When you research these productivity laws, you can make a strong impact with your employees as I have done here taken from a newsletter article I wrote several years ago.
Have you heard of Parkinson's Law? Simply stated, the law states that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” That’s the observation made by the British author and historian C. Northcote Parkinson, writing for The Economist in 1955. The few who are able to overcome this productivity-killing phenomenon are able to work so efficiently that they seem to have magical powers. Here’s how to join this elite group: Shorten the amount of time required to complete a task and correspondingly increase the urgency of completion by promising it sooner. You will develop more efficient work habits with this intervention, and you will find more free time in your life that you struggle to find right now. A simple way to work with this principle is to take a kitchen time and set it for say, thirty minutes and tell yourself you will finish a project before the bell goes off. The move to your next task and repeat the strategy. Subscribe to Frontline Employee -- a newsletter you can distribute to the workforce, rename and call your own, and finally have an on-time, highly visible EAP newsletter for improved utilization and program preservation.
