Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available. Small, short projects quickly become big, long projects when too many people are there to work on them.

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

Parkinson’s Law: if you don’t set a limit on your available time, your work will expand to fill it all.

People are capable of far more than they think, on far shorter timelines. Problems expand to fill the time you give them.

Workers are desperate for more autonomy over their lives. They crave more balance and less precarity. They also, crucially, want to work. But they want to work for places that treat them as human beings and that invest in them and their futures. They want to be a part of organizations that recognize that meaningful and collaborative work can bring dignity and create value but that work is by no means the only way to cultivate satisfaction and self-worth. We know that workers who are overextended become too tired, frustrated, and anxious to do their best work; they’re too busy trying to tread water, look busy, and keep poorly communicating bosses happy.

[Satiation may spill over outside the specific task to structurally similar tasks) and may end up in an early] exhaustion of the occupational will.

As organizations grow large, important work can go unnoticed, the hardest workers can get passed over by the best politicians, and bureaucratic processes can choke out the creativity and remove all the joy.

The work on any worthy project is endless, infinite. You cannot limit the work so you must limit your hours. Your time, not the work, is the only thing you can manage.

Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people's souls and thoughts. Every expansion of government in business means that government in order to protect itself from the political consequences of its errors and wrongs is driven irresistibly without peace to greater and greater control of the nation's press and platform. Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die.

There is actually no limit to the amount of work to be done. Work creates work. What A produces constitutes the demand for what B produces.

If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

The spread-the-work schemes, in brief, rest on the same sort of illusion that we have been considering. The people who support such schemes think only of the employment they would provide for particular persons or groups; they do not stop to consider what their whole effect would be on everybody.<p>The spread-the-work schemes rest also, as we began by pointing out, on the false assumption that there is just a fixed amount of work to be done. There could be no greater fallacy. There is no limit to the amount of work to be done as long as any human need or wish that work could fill remains unsatisfied. In a modern exchange economy, the most work will be done when prices, costs, and wages are in the best relations to each other.

If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay.