If you’ve ever spent two hours formatting a report that should’ve taken 15 minutes, you’ve experienced Parkinson’s Law firsthand.
First coined in the 1950s by British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson, the law is simple:
“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”
In practice, that means if you give a task a week, it will take a week. Not because it needs to. But because of meetings, procrastination, overthinking, polishing, approvals, and all the other little rituals of modern work.
This isn’t a personal failing. It’s a systemic one. And it’s made worse in teams and organisations that grow without rethinking how work gets done.
Now, AI is giving us a way to push back.
Parkinson’s Law Is a Hidden Cost Centre
Here’s what Parkinson’s Law looks like in a typical business:
- Weekly reports that take half a day to compile
- Proposal documents that go through five iterations and still miss the point
- Customer support responses written from scratch when 80% of queries are repetitive
- Manual data entry or reconciliation “just to be sure” even when systems could do it
The work feels important. But much of it is just inertia, busywork, or a lack of systems.
When work has no constraints, it expands. But when we introduce meaningful automation, something interesting happens:
It shrinks.
What AI Brings to the Table
AI doesn’t make Parkinson’s Law disappear. But it gives you leverage against it.
Let’s say your team sends weekly performance reports. It usually takes someone a couple of hours to gather the data, format the deck, write the commentary, and share it. With AI, you can:
- Auto-generate the report from your analytics tool
- Use a natural language model to write a one-paragraph summary per slide
- Send it to Slack or email, tagged and sorted, without lifting a finger
Time to complete: less than 5 minutes
Effort saved: hours
Outcome: better consistency, lower overhead, and people freed up to focus on decision-making instead of formatting charts
This isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening.
A Mental Shift: From “How Long Will This Take?” to “Should We Do This at All?”
The most powerful effect of AI isn’t just automating tasks. It’s changing the questions we ask.
Instead of asking:
- How long should we give the team for this?
- Can someone pull together the doc before Friday?
- Do we have capacity to do this manually for now?
You start asking:
- Is this worth doing manually?
- Can we turn this into a prompt or a workflow?
- How do we prevent this from recurring?
This is where AI helps you escape the trap of Parkinson’s Law. It forces clarity. It introduces constraints. It highlights where effort isn’t delivering value.
What This Looks Like in the Real World
Here are some real examples from businesses I’ve worked with:
- Client onboarding packs built in under 30 seconds from form submissions
- Contract summaries generated instantly from PDFs using AI agents
- Internal knowledge answers returned in seconds from Notion, SharePoint or Google Drive
- Sales follow-up emails written by AI while the rep is still on the call
It’s not about removing humans. It’s about giving them the space to operate at a higher level.
Final Thought: Don’t Let Work Drift
Parkinson’s Law is silent. You rarely see it coming. But over time, it slows your team, bloats your processes, and saps your margins.
AI is not a magic wand. But it is a scalpel. And when used well, it cuts through the drift, letting you build systems that scale, not stall.
If you’re still trying to do everything the long way, it’s time to rethink.
Want to explore where Parkinson’s Law is costing your business?
I can help you map out where AI automation will have the most impact, and implement it without disrupting what already works.
Get in touch if you’d like to walk through some examples of how AI agents can help you become more efficient and more productive.
