Policy & Practice | Fall 2023

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By Bill Bott

Piles of Stuff: Changing Our Thinking to Keep the Work Flowing

T wenty years ago, a phone rang on someone else’s desk, in some other office, in some other building, with an angry customer on the other end demanding to know, “Where is my stuff?” And the deadline was born. After all, the customer had a point; they had been waiting two months for the stuff and it should have been done weeks ago. There needed to be a mechanism to make sure this never happened again. So it was decided that the stuff should never take more than 30 days to complete. Thirty days became the deadline for all the stuff. It was a safety net, set up to tell man agement that if the stuff goes past this point, clients are going to be upset. For a while, no one really worried about the deadline. A month to process the stuff seemed like plenty of time, and it would have been, if not for two laws no one can avoid forever. The first is Murphy’s Law: if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. The second is the slightly more scientific Parkinson’s Law: work will expand to fill the time allotted. Think of all the Murphy’s Law–type things that happen to our stuff. Clients fail to provide us with what we need to process the stuff, the federal guide lines on stuff just changed to include all new stuff, so-in-so just quit and we learned they have been hiding the stuff in a closet for months and now we have to catch up on their stuff. If there is a problem that can occur with the stuff, we have seen it, had to fix it, and tried to do it within 30 days. While Murphy’s Law is an onslaught of outside influences making it harder to do the stuff, Parkinson’s Law is

counter-intuitive to our deadline as safety net thinking. What we hope for is a mark in time that work should not go past, but what we get is the finish line to the race, with workers natu rally expanding their efforts to that finish line. Parkinson’s Law presents a problem for deadlines, but it is only the start. When work extends to the deadline, and some work begins going over that date, thanks to Mr. Murphy, we begin to manage all work to the deadline. This means we begin to work the oldest stuff in order to have less “late” and new stuff has to wait until it gets closer to deadline. With more stuff waiting, more customers are calling asking where their stuff is, which robs us of our capacity to do the stuff… and so on, and so forth. Now all the stuff is finished around, or slightly after the deadline.

more of an internal ailment that slowly expands the work closer to the deadline and weakens our ability to fight off Murphy. For example, in college we are given a syllabus that clearly says we have a research paper due at the end of the term. We could just take the weekend and knock out the 20 or so hours it takes to do a great paper. Instead, we are likely to do a little research here and there, maybe outline a section or two a month out, and even a little writing, as the semester progresses. Then, three days before the paper is due, we buckle down. The work has expanded to the deadline. Then, Murphy hits you with a surprise left, the laptop gives you the blue screen of death, and you miss the deadline. The very idea that all work will naturally expand to the deadline is

Illustration by Chris Campbell

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Policy & Practice Fall 2023