Law of Triviality: Why the Smallest Item Takes the Longest

This page is about the law as Parkinson stated it, a claim about committee time and the sums on an agenda, with his own invented meeting as the illustration. The same idea travels under another name in software and product work, where it is called bikeshedding after a 1999 mailing list message, and the bike-shedding effect is the name for that version and for how the phrase is used in projects today.

Parkinson's formulation was blunt: "the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved." His explanation was about who can speak. A ten-million-dollar reactor is beyond most of the committee's knowledge, nobody wants to admit that, and the one member who could ask a sharp question would have to start by explaining what a reactor is, so he says nothing. A bicycle shed is inside everyone's competence. Coffee is inside everyone's experience. The small item is where the committee can finally do something that feels like diligence, especially just after waving through something it did not understand.

Judgment research supplies a mechanism for the same pattern. Christopher Hsee's evaluability hypothesis, published in 1996, holds that an attribute gets weight in a decision to the extent that it can be evaluated, and that attributes which are hard to judge in isolation lose influence even when everyone agrees they matter more. The number of entries in a dictionary means little on its own, while a torn cover is obvious, so the obvious attribute drives the valuation when the two are judged separately. Agenda time behaves the same way: the item people can evaluate is the item they can discuss.

One limit has to be stated plainly, because it is easy to miss. Parkinson's committee is fiction. He was a naval historian writing satirical essays about administration, and the three timings in the demo above are the ones he wrote for effect, not measurements from a real meeting. There is no dataset behind the law of triviality, and this page cites none, because none exists. What the research literature supports is the mechanism: easily evaluated features capture weight, and people contribute where they feel competent. The law itself is a shrewd observation that has survived seventy years because readers keep recognizing their own meetings in it.

There is no original study, and saying so is part of describing this entry honestly. The law of triviality appears in "High Finance, or the Point of Vanishing Interest," the third chapter of C. Northcote Parkinson's book Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration, published in 1957 after the essays had run in The Economist.

The chapter stages a finance committee meeting as a script. Item Nine is the main contract for an atomic reactor, ten million dollars in the American edition. Parkinson counts the committee: of eleven members including the chairman, four do not know what a reactor is, three more do not know what it is for, and of the two who know what one should cost, one is dissatisfied with the contractors and the other, Mr. Brickworth, has real objections to the round number and the contingency allowance but cannot see where to begin, because he would have to explain the blueprint to people who will not admit they cannot read it. He says he has no comment. Allowing for the rustling of papers, the item takes two and a half minutes.

Item Ten is a bicycle shed for the clerical staff at 2,350 dollars. Here the committee comes alive: aluminum or asbestos or galvanized iron for the roof, whether the staff need a shed at all, whether the price is excessive. The debate runs forty-five minutes and may save about three hundred dollars, and the members sit back with a feeling of achievement. Item Eleven is refreshments at the Joint Welfare Committee, 4.75 dollars a month, fifty-seven dollars a year. It is coffee, and everyone knows about coffee: what it is, how it should be made, where it should be bought, whether it should be bought at all. That item takes an hour and a quarter and ends with the secretary being asked for further information so the matter can be decided at the next meeting.

Parkinson then asks where the reversal lies, the sum so small that a committee waves it through as beneath notice, and admits he does not know. The British first edition uses pounds, with a 350 pound shed and twenty-one pounds a year of refreshments; the demo above uses the American edition's figures.

The law needs a group, an agenda and items of unequal size. The rows below are illustrations, not findings from a study.

Nothing in Parkinson's essay or in the evaluability research tested a fix, so the moves below follow from the mechanism: time goes where people feel able to speak, and the fix is to make the big item speakable and the small item somebody's job.

• Timebox in proportion to the stake, and put the limits on the agenda before the meeting rather than negotiating them in it.
• Make the large item evaluable. One page with the three numbers that decide it, circulated in advance, gives the committee something it can hold an opinion about.
• Ask the naive question yourself. If four people in the room do not know what the thing is, the meeting improves the moment one of them says so.
• Delegate the trivia with a deadline. A decision one person can make alone does not belong on a group agenda, and saying who decides is faster than deciding.
• Put the biggest item first, while attention and time are still available, and keep small items in a batch at the end.

Parkinson wrote more than one law, and the neighbors here are easy to blur.

• It is not the bike-shedding effect under another name. The two name the same pattern from different ends: the law of triviality is Parkinson's committee-time claim and the agenda arithmetic behind it, while bike-shedding is the phrase that came out of Poul-Henning Kamp's 1999 message to the FreeBSD developers and the way it is used about projects and open-source debates.
• It is not Parkinson's law itself, the better-known line that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. That one is about how long a task takes; the law of triviality is about how a group divides attention between tasks.
• It is not information bias, the appetite for more information that cannot change a decision. A committee arguing about a shed is not seeking information; it is spending the time it has on the thing it can judge.
• It is not the planning fallacy, the tendency to underestimate how long work will take. The law of triviality describes misallocated discussion, not optimistic forecasts.