Study Hacks: "The phenomenal success of Tim Ferriss’s recent book, The Four-Hour Work Week, brought to prominence a distressing trend that has been recently plaguing the self-help community: citing rough summaries of scientific principles as evidence for unrelated how-to advice.
The principle, in particular, that I’m interested in here is Parkinson’s Law. Informally, the law states:
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
This was the opening sentence of the humorous essay Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson published in The Economist in 1955. The essay went on to explain the results of a study of the British Civil Service. (Click here for an expanded version of the essay published in Parkinson’s eponymous book on the subject).
Unfortunately, as we’ll see, in modern usage the study itself has been discarded in favor of this one sentence opening — a tendency that obscures its true meaning."
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