parkinson's law

Work expands as to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson's law is an administrative principle that states that work tends to expand in relation to the time available for its completion. From C. Northcote Parkinson, a professor of the University of Malaysia, who first wrote of this law. While Parkinson, like Laurence J. Peter, apparently wrote his book as a satire on administration, unfortunately it turned out to be true.

Parkinson's law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Extensive research by volunteers has shown that for warez and porn, a similar principle applies. The applied Parkinson's law states that "warez and porn expand so as to fill the storage space available." The law's application in this context suggests also that warez and porn are gaseous in nature.

In practice this means that over time, the storage space occupied by warez and porn files increases to fill any void present on the writable storage medium they are contained on. During research it was shown that no matter how large the researcher's hard drives grew, warez and porn always expanded to fill any space available.

Some of the longer-term researchers also reported that the growth rate of warez and porn seemed to closely follow Moore's law. Further research is required to determine if this is the cause or an effect of Parkinson's law's applicability to warez and porn. It is even possible that the inverse is true - that warez and porn are in fact the cause for Moore's law in the first place.

Despite common misconceptions, Parkinson’s law is in fact more akin to Poka Yoke whereby a relentless focus on increasing the efficiency of an organization through any means necessary benefits both employees and shareholders.