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Parkinson’s law – five laws of UX

The same job can require a vastly different amount of time and effort. For instance, you can make dinner in either 30 minutes or 3 hours. Of course, you are not going to cook a dish that requires 20 steps and several hours of waiting, unless it’s a weekend and you have more time… Here we go, Parkinson’s law in action:

“Work expands (complicates) so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

The second-order effect you can draw from this is that without a time limit, you can spend more time on a task than is actually required. It becomes especially important in a multi-step process. Let’s say you have two weeks to redesign a website. If you don’t plan how much time you have for each step, by the time you finish with research, you might not have enough time for design.

I am not saying that you can get the same output from a day of work that you can get from a week. But without considering time, you can default to cooking a multi-course dinner even when what you need is a sandwich.