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Parkinson’s Law, Month-End Closes, and Why 70% Beats Perfect



We see it everywhere. In school, a simple assignment becomes an epic because the deadline is far away. On Saturdays, three chores take all day. Fifteen chores before lunch, though, and suddenly we are a machine.

Inside teams it looks the same. Years ago, we built monthly sales reports with clunky tools. Data dumps to Excel, formulas that would make a grown analyst cry, screenshots pasted into PowerPoint. It was slow, manual, and fragile. But we had a clear ritual. Billing finished, the clock started, and we hustled to get intelligence to leaders fast. In four months we cut our cycle time in half. Then we cut it in half again. Not because we became wizards. Because the drumbeat was nonnegotiable.


Finance gets this. Month-end close has a name, a schedule, and a consequence if you miss it. Some teams insist they cannot close in less than twelve days. Others expect it in two. The work is similar. The expectation is not. And expectations set the container that work grows to fill.


Operations and product often miss this. The work is repeatable, but we treat it like a series of one-off events. We chase shiny tools instead of the process that makes those tools worth having. We redesign dashboards while ignoring the ritual that produces the numbers. Then we wonder why the cycle keeps stretching and the outcomes feel random.


Parkinson’s Law is not a warning. It is a design input. If work will expand to fill the container, design a smaller container and make it routine.

That does not mean precision at all costs. In knowledge work, precision is expensive and often unnecessary. Leaders who demand 97 percent certainty pay a hidden tax in time and attention. The extra nine or ten percent rarely changes a decision, but it always delays it. The better play is 70 percent confidence on a reliable cadence. Ship the update. Make the call. Then tighten the loop with what you learn next time.


Make it concrete.

If your team fields twenty inbound requests a month, do not start with an automation platform. Start with a gate. Define how requests show up, when you say yes, and the service-level you commit to. Publish a weekly prioritization ritual that takes twenty minutes. Hold it every Tuesday at 9. Now the container exists.


If your handoffs between sales and delivery are sloppy, do not start by drawing a perfect swimlane map. Start with a short checklist that must be read out loud. Three questions. Five minutes. Every deal. Make that the drumbeat, then add a simple report that shows the number of handoffs, the misses, and the rework. Review it at the same time each week.


If reporting is always late and always different, resist the urge to rebuild the dashboard. Pick the two metrics that actually drive decisions this month. Agree on the query and the date range. Ship them on a two day clock after close. Put the rest in a parking lot. Improve the contents once the drumbeat is real.


This is how you pay down process debt. Not with a transformation program. With small containers, clear expectations, and rituals that survive the week’s chaos. Once the cadence exists, you can layer on automation or analytics and they will stick. You can even graduate to smarter decisions by updating your priors each cycle. That is a fancy way of saying the team learns in public, at a regular tempo, and gets better.

Parkinson’s Law will always be true. The trick is to make it work for you.


Process Debt Truth: If you do not put the work on a clock, the clock will run your work.

 
 
 

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