Any journalist will tell you: the time taken to write an article depends on the deadline. You can spend days agonising over a column, only to write something the same length in a matter of minutes once time pressure kicks in. This is Parkinson’s Law in action: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
Cyril Northcote Parkinson first put this idea to The Economist in 1955, and it has resonated ever since. But I like his lesser known Law of Triviality even better. This says that we tend to devote a disproportionately long time to minor choices, and leave mind-bendingly, life-changingly big decisions unattended.
This is also known as bike-shedding – and the Decision Lab explains why:
Parkinson outlined the law of triviality through a metaphorical story. He asked people to imagine a financial committee meeting where there were three matters on the agenda:
A proposal for a ￡10 million nuclear power plant
A proposal for a ￡350 staff bike shed
A proposal for a ￡21 annual coffee budget
He suggested that the committee would look past the first proposal because it is too difficult for people to voice their opinions on such a complicated issue. The committee would quickly move on to the proposal for the bike shed and spend far more time discussing it than they did the nuclear plant. Finally, they would spend the most amount of time discussing the coffee budget, as the simplest of the three proposals.
We are guilty of doing this in our own lives – it’s much easier to spend an hour arguing with a chatbot securing a discount on our phone contract than logging into our workplace pension to see if our retirement is on track.
I suspect that we do it at an economy-wide level, too. Are young people struggling because of all those weekend breaks and expensive brunches? No. But it took hold as a narrative because it’s far simpler than the tangled mess of stagnant graduate salaries, Plan 2 student loans and unreachable house prices. Sometimes we really shouldn’t sweat the small stuff – we should sweat the big stuff instead.