PPP238: Parkinson’s Law: Works expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

I often say, “I get more done, the busier I am.”

Cyril Northcote Parkinson said the same thing, much more elegantly. Here is the first paragraph of an article he wrote in 1955. 

“IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.”

On today’s show, we are taking Parkinson’s theory and applying it to piano study.