Thurner also looked at inefficiencies in Parkinson’s original context: governments. In another study, he and his colleagues examined cabinet sizes of nearly 200 countries. They found that cabinet size was negatively correlated with government effectiveness; political stability; voice and accountability as measured by the World Bank; and life expectancy, knowledge and standard of living as measured by the United Nations.

To test how the size of a group affects its ability to make decisions, they created a model based on information flow networks and found that a significant change occurred when groups hit 20. “We found a realistic linking pattern of people and gave artificial committees random initial opinions on subjects,” he says. “At 20 you see a strong difference in coalition building. Smaller groups form and they block each other, which explains why it is exceedingly hard to come up with unanimous decisions when cabinets are large.”

Can ‘menacing’ deadlines cure dallying?

So if the wider points Parkinson was making about bureaucracies still stand up today, what of his enduring first line? Today, while some researchers might chuckle at the mention of the ‘law’ that has come to mean so much more than its original intent, there’s also no doubt they know what it is referring to. Is there some truth to the notion that without strict time constraints, we waste time and our work takes longer to complete?

In fact, studies in the decades since Parkinson wrote his essay have shown it has some merit. In the 1960s, researchers showed that when subjects were “accidentally” given extra time to complete a task, the task took longer to complete. In another set of studies from 1999, subjects were asked to evaluate four sets of photos. When they were told the fourth set was cancelled, they spent more time “dallying” on the third, rather than just finishing the task more quickly. Researchers also found that the extra time spent on a task ­– in this case counting the number of letters in a phrase – didn’t lead to increased accuracy or ability to recall word pairs on a surprise test afterwards.       

So does this mean that as a writer, I should be setting my deadlines earlier or limiting the work I do on each story? In general, should we be imposing tougher time constraints to improve our productivity?