Parkinson's Law

Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands to fill the time available.” Initially postulated to explain workload and time, Parkinson’s Law has been applied to and found valid in many realms. “The amount of stuff one has expands to fill available cupboard space” is one familiar application. Information technology also has its applications. Parkinson’s Law of data: “Data expands to fill the space available for storage”. Parkinson’s Law of Bandwidth Absorption: “Network traffic expands to fill the available bandwidth”. Unfortunately we have not found it applicable to our wallet nor to its contents. Pity.

HISTORY

In 1986, Alessandro Natta complained about the swelling bureaucracy in Italy. Mikhail Gorbachev responded that “‘Parkinson’s Law works everywhere.”[3]
[edit] Corollaries

In time, however, the first-referenced meaning of the phrase has dominated, and sprouted several corollaries: for example, the derivative relating to computers:

Data expands to fill the space available for storage.

In terms of computer executable code filling CPU resource (see software bloat), a similar law is Wirth’s law.

A second aphorism, attributed to Parkinson and sometimes called “Parkinson’s second law”, is “expenditures rise to meet income”.

A modern version is that no amount of computer automation will reduce the size of a bureaucracy.[4]

The Stock-Sanford Corollary to Parkinson’s Law reads, “If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.” If a task can expand to fill the time allotted, then conversely, the effort given can be limited by limiting the allotted time. This phrase is often associated with procrastination. The Rick’s Corollary to Parkinson’s Law reads “You will fill up as much (storage) space that you have available to you” or put another way, you will acquire enough “stuff” to fill up the storage space that is available to you.
[edit] Generalization

“Parkinson’s Law” could be generalized further still as:

The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource.

An extension is often added to this, stating that:

the reverse is not true.

This generalization has become very similar to the economic law of demand; that the lower the price of a service or commodity, the greater the quantity demanded.