Parkinson's law of triviality

Disproportionate time gets spent on trivial decisions.

My fellow software engineers and leaders, we spend too much time talking about things that do not matter.

• formatting for PR titles
• rigid guidelines for user stories
• new runbooks for each outage ever experienced
• refactoring as soon as we reuse some code once
• extra CI checks
• overlapping integration tests

Complex topics often have a tremendous amount of data to sift through before getting to the part of making a decision.

Decision making for many is the fun part. And so it seems easier and more emotionally rewarding to tackle the easiest and obvious things first.

Incidentally, “Bikeshedding” comes originally from this maxim as well. Bikeshedding itself refers to the act of wasting time on trivial aspects of a project or task, or concentrating on a small detail instead of the task at large. So it’s effectively a word to describe the activity of this law.

In practice:

The fix is relatively straightforward: have an agenda and/or time box discussions.

Word to the wise, you may not be popular for shutting down a lively debate, but as long as you’re not a jerk about it, no one will remember in a week.

For more details, read:

C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law, and Other Studies in Administration, Houghton Mifflin, 1957.