In 1955, British historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a satirical essay about government bureaucracy. Seventy years later, the law that came from it may be more relevant than ever.

In 1955, a British historian named C. Northcote Parkinson published a short, sardonic essay in The Economist about why government departments keep growing regardless of how much work they actually have. It was meant as satire.

Productivity culture borrowed the central idea and has not given it back.

The idea was this: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Seventy years later, I’d say this observation has never been more relevant.

I can confirm it, personally. Not in some abstract, applies-to-everyone sense. I mean it in the specific sense that the day I give myself eight hours to do four hours of work is, reliably, the day that takes eight hours or more.

I am a freelance writer who works mostly from home and coffee shops. Nobody tells me when to stop. And remote work, for all its obvious advantages, has a hidden cost: the flexibility is the trap.

Perhaps, in an office, it’s easier. In an office, you have signals. Colleagues put on their coats. The building empties. The commute home functions as a hard boundary between work and the rest of the day.

When you work remotely, none of that exists. The day just continues. There is always one more thing to read, one more sentence to tighten, one more tab to open. Work finds the space you give it.

The counterintuitive thing is that remote workers often tell themselves the opposite. All that flexibility, the thinking goes, means I can be more efficient. I can fit work around my life rather than the other way around. And this is partly true — but only if you impose some structure on it. Without the structure, you don’t work less. You just work differently, and you work more, but not necessarily better.

I have about three hours a day of writing that is actually worth anything before quality slips. The remaining hours are not wasted — there is research, correspondence, editing — but they are not the core work. They are fill. And without a hard stop, fill expands.

Here’s how to give work less room: 

Set a hard stop — and set it before you start

Most advice about hard stops gets the timing wrong. People say: pick a time to stop. And they mean it as something you decide during the day — at three in the afternoon you resolve to wrap up by six. But by three in the afternoon, Parkinson’s Law is already running. You have committed the time. Work has expanded to fill it.

The hard stop has to be decided before you open the laptop. Not as a calendar event you might reschedule, but as a genuine boundary — the end of the working day is already fixed, and the only question is what gets done before it arrives.

Cal Newport, the best selling author of Deep Work,describes a practice that makes the boundary concrete. At the close of his workday, he shuts down his computer and says a fixed phrase out loud — “schedule shutdown, complete” — as a deliberate signal that work is finished for the day. The specific words don’t matter. What matters is the act of closing: something that tells you, in terms you can’t easily renegotiate, that this is done. Without a ritual like that, work tends to seep into the evening anyway, not because there is more of it, but because there is nothing stopping it.

Last month I tried a version of this. I set a stop at five, wrote it into my notes at the start of the morning, and treated it the way I would treat a meeting I couldn’t move. By four-thirty, the piece I’d been stretching was done. Not because I worked harder — I hadn’t. The deadline was just closer, and the work found a way to fit. The days the stop slips, the work slips with it.

Time block in shorter units

Hard stops define the end of the day. Time blocking does the same thing for individual tasks within it.

Giving yourself “the morning” to write is a much larger container than giving yourself 90 minutes. The 90-minute version has built-in pressure — a smaller, deliberate version of Parkinson’s Law working in reverse. Work contracts to fit the time you give it, just as it expands when you give it more.

The blocks don’t need to be elaborate. They need to be specific: this task, this window, this end point. When the block is over, you move on — whether the task feels finished or not. Most of the time, it is. And if it isn’t, you know exactly how much more it actually needs.

Parkinson’s Law is not a productivity hack. It is a description of something that happens on its own when you are not paying attention. Work fills the space you give it. It always has.

The only move as far as I can see is to make the space smaller.