Scientific Definition
Work expands to fill the time available for it.
Plain-English Definition
Work expands to fill the time available for it.
Feynman Explanation
Give a team six months for a two-week task; it will take six months.
Core Principle
Work expands to fill the time available for it.
Mechanisms
Work expands to fill the time available for it.
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Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Give a team six months for a two-week task; it will take six months.
Examples
- Strategy refresh that consumes a year because a year was scheduled.
- Timeline-bloat as a structural feature, not a bug.
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Famous Experiments
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Design Principles
- Compress deadlines deliberately. Time pressure is a feature.
Measurement Approaches
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Evidence
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The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Compress deadlines deliberately. Time pressure is a feature.
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Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Doing something feels safer than doing nothing — even when nothing wins.
Feelings act as shortcuts for facts.
Over-reliance on the first number that hits the table.
Adding a clearly worse option steers people toward the option you wanted.
Whatever is pre-selected wins more often than it should.
We value things more once they're ours.
The same information lands differently depending on how it's wrapped.
We disproportionately prefer rewards now over rewards later.
We overvalue things we built ourselves.
Believing more information leads to better decisions, regardless of relevance.
When trivial metrics become the target, the trivial becomes the strategy.
Losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good.