Your Busy Work is not your Life's Work.

British naval historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson is famous for the eponymous law, which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” He wrote about Parkinson’s Law in a 1955 “The Economist” Essay 1 and also in his 1957 book Parkinson’s Law and Other Studies in Administration.

“It is the busiest man who has time to spare.”

Parkinson writes about an elderly lady who spends the entire day writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece. A task that would take a busy individual less than three minutes. But the woman spent an hour finding the postcard, half an hour looking for her glasses, another half hour searching for the address, 75 minutes composing the card and 20 minutes deciding whether to or not take an umbrella when going to the mailbox in the next street.

Parkinson observed that granted that work (and especially paperwork) is thus elastic in its demands on time, it is manifest that there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned. A lack of real activity does not, of necessity, result in leisure. A lack of occupation is not necessarily revealed by a manifest idleness. The thing to be done swells in importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent.

“Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need” – Voltaire

As Henry David Thoreau once quipped, “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” Like the lady in the above story by Parkinson, it is easy to spend our time frivolously. It is important to be able to separate the vital few from the useful many. The life expectancy in most advanced nations is around 78-80 years. An average human life will spend one-third of their life sleeping (26 years) and another one-third of that time working (26 years). That leaves less than thirty years to be with our family, friends and enjoy life itself. As late Apple CEO Steve Jobs advised in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech³, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.” Jobs then said the following profound words on the value of finding meaningful work:

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

It’s not about the hours you spend but about the harmony you feel. ⁴ Often, people simply feel unhappy with, or disconnected from, their work. If you don’t like your work and you have to spend a lot of time doing it, then of course you feel as though life is out of balance. You would recognize that your busywork isn’t your life’s work, and that dissonance would cause you mental distress. That’s why it’s important to live in harmony with what you truly desire. You’ll always feel out of balance if you’re doing work that you don’t find engaging and meaningful.

Other times, people are engaged and enjoying their work, but they’re fried from too much stress and too many hours on the job. There’s a fine line between busy and burned out, and when you cross it, no matter how great your life is outside work, you will feel out of balance. Burnout in one area of life easily scorches others.