Scott LaPlant Swell Chap that loves Linux

While getting a big check from Uncle Sam feels pretty cool, it also means that you’re probably withholding too much from your paycheck each month. Kiplinger’s Tax Withholding Calculator helps you figure out how much in allowances you should be claiming.

Photo by koelk_h.

Unfortunately, figuring out how much to withhold can be a pretty complicated deal for those of us who don’t entirely understand tax code. Kiplinger comes to the rescue with an easy-to-use Withholding Calculator, that, while somewhat simplified, will give you a general idea of what you should be withholding—and all you need to do to claim those allowances is file a revised W-4. The calculator requires that your financial state is pretty much the same this year as it was last year, so if you’ve gone through any major financial changes (e.g., having a baby, getting a new job) it won’t work as well. Hit the link to test it out.

Tax Withholding Calculator Tells You If You’re Withholding Too Much [Tax Time] from Lifehacker: top

Windows: It may not stick around that long once the powers that be find out, so if downloading and watching Hulu videos offline could help you out, grab StreamTransport. The tricky little app provides full-quality captures of streaming shows and movies.

We’ve previously pointed out a Hulu Video Downloader that did a more robust job of downloading and converting Hulu’s offerings for enjoyment on computers and portable devices. That tool is now gone, and you’ve probably got a good guess as to why. StreamTransport provides the same downloading function, and the quality is aces—a Saturday Night Live sketch we grabbed for a test came out looking like an iTunes (non-HD) download. The downloaded files are FLV formatted, which VLC Media Player has no problem opening, or converting for other platforms. It also can grab YouTube and a few other Flash-based videos, according to its creator, though we haven’t tested it outside of Hulu.

When possible, you should go the legal, non-work-around method of streaming your shows through Hulu, commercials and all. If you’re fiending to catch just the last episode of a series before a flight, though, StreamTransport could be handy in a pinch—providing it’s still around when you get to it. It’s a free download for Windows systems only.

StreamTransport Grabs Hulu Videos for Offline Viewing [Downloads] from Lifehacker: top

Nobody is fond of tax time, but the right tools can help you get your taxes done on time and maybe even net you a little refund for your effort. This week we look at the five most popular preparation tools.

Photo by Alan Cleaver.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite tool for preparing your taxes. You responded, we tallied the votes, and now we’re back with the five most popular tools for tax preparation.

Note: Several of the entries in the tax preparation Hive Five fall under the umbrella of “self filed” but we’ve made the distinction between using automated or semi-automated software and manually filling out your tax forms. Using TurboTax and filling in the 1040EZ with a pen are both methods of self-filing your taxes but only one of them requires the filer to fill and calculate every slot in the form.

Prices are for filing your Federal tax return. Each tax software company has different policies on how much they charge for filing state taxes. Prices range from free—if you buy the bells and whistles premium version!—to a portion of the cost of the federal filing.

Manual Tax Preparation (Web or Paper-based, Free)

Two kinds of people like doing their own taxes: people with uncomplicated tax liabilities that can use simple tax forms and masochists. If you’re in the former it’s really easy to hop online and either electronically file or download and print the basic tax forms you need. You can find the electronic forms here, the most popular printable forms are on the front of the IRS site—upper left side—or you can dig through the forms directory for what you need. If you have simple taxes it doesn’t make sense to pay a tax preparer a couple hundred bucks to just ask you basic questions and fill out the form for you. If you’re in the latter part of our earlier dichotomy and have more complicated taxes it might be worth hiring a professional or at minimum buying one of the annual books on preparing your taxes at home. Photo by Ingorrr.

Accountant/CPA(Hired Professional, Variable Cost)

Whether you don’t trust yourself to complete your tax forms properly or your tax liability is so complicated it’s time to call in a professional, hiring an accountant takes the pressure off your shoulders and puts your tax preparation in the hands of a professional. Not all accountants are equal however and it pays to do your research. CPAs—certified public accountants—have to complete more training, certification, and continuing education than those without the legal designation of CPA. You can visit the two sites above to search through directories of accountants and CPAs or you can head over to Wikipedia and read up on what it means to be a CPA or accountant. Photo by alancleaver.

TurboTax (Windows/Web-based, Basic: $14.95, Premier: $49.95)

TurboTax has built a name for itself among those who don’t want to manually file their taxes but don’t want to shell out for a professional. TurboTax has several great features including actively watching for available tax deductions and then rescanning for deductions before finalizing the return, importation of previous year’s data for returning customers, and audit risk tracking. If you run into problems with the software or the website, TurboTax offers some of the best tech support in the industry. When you’re done filing your taxes, TurboTax offers suggestions on how—based on your current return and your spending—you could optimize for a better return in the coming year. TurboTax is available as a web-based service or a Windows application.

TaxAct (Web-based/Windows, Basic: Free, Ultimate: $17.95)

TaxAct is lesser known, by comparison to giants like TurboTax and HR Block, but don’t let that dissuade you. It still has quite a few features and the lowest price tag of the bunch. You can file your federal taxes for free or get the Ultimate package that includes both your federal and state returns for a mere $17.95—many of the other services here come close to hitting $100 with deluxe state and federal returns. While TaxAct won’t send a lawyer on your behalf like HR Block will, you still have protections—they will pay all your penalty fees and interest if their software causes you any tax problems. TaxAct isn’t bells and whistles laden but it’s a competent package with enough features and a low enough price tag to win many people over. TaxAct is available as a web-based service or a Windows application.

HR Block at Home (Web-based, Basic: Free, Deluxe: $29.95)

While TurboTax gets five stars for the best tech support, HR Block scored highly for support regarding actual tax questions—a natural extension of their decades old tax preparation business. HR Block at Home is also the only DIY home tax software that comes with guaranteed accuracy and audit defense—they’ll represent you in an IRS audit if the audit results from their error. HR Block at Home imports data from itself—previous year’s info—or from TurboTax if you’re looking to change your preparation software this year. Excellent support aside, the strongest selling point of HR Block at Home is the extremely simplified user-interface, you won’t feel like you’re crunching numbers in a spreadsheet when using it. HR Block at Home is available as a web-based service or a Windows application.

---

Now that you’ve had a chance to look over the top five contenders for best tax preparation tool, it’s time to cast your vote in the poll below:

Which Tax Preparation Tool Is Best?survey

Have a tax prep tip, trick, or favorite application that wasn’t mentioned here? Share it in the comments. Have a great idea for the next Hive Five? Send an email to tips@lifehacker.com with “Hive Five” in the subject line and we’ll see what we can do about getting it the limelight it deserves.

Five Best Tax Preparation Tools [Hive Five] from Lifehacker: top

I’m thrilled to announce that the online book by Adam Pash and myself, The Complete Guide to Google Wave, is now in print! Order your copy here.

The new edition is double the pagecount of the Preview PDF which we released in October and packed with screenshots and examples. With this expansion, Adam and I went out of our way page after page to illustrate the answer the most common question about Wave: “What is the point?” We added two new chapters, completely rewrote several existing chapters, and since the book is now available in print, added an index for easy reference. We scored a Foreword from one of my web heroes, Lars Rasmussen, who with his brother Jens created Google Maps and Google Wave.

The coolest part of this DIY undertaking is that a portion of print book sales go to a great cause. San Diego-based charity Partnerships with Industry fulfills our print book orders. Instead of giving half the purchase cost of the book to an existing print-on-demand service like Lulu, your book dollars create a job for adults with developmental disabilities.

The new first edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave is available as both a PDF ($9) and a print book ($25) and on the web site (free). If you’ve already purchased the Preview PDF, as a way to say thanks for your early support, we’re upgrading you to the first edition PDF for free. Keep an eye on your email inbox for that. If you haven’t already bought a copy, order yours here.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave Now in Print! [Announcements] from Lifehacker: top

Developers and product managers from the Gmail team hosted a jam-packed panel at SXSW Interactive yesterday, and talked in a refreshingly honest manner about what they’ve done and what’s coming next—including speed improvements, new features, Buzz, better Contacts, and more.

Photo by davidh.walker.

A recurring topic during the Gmail panel was speed. Gmail Engineer Jonathan Perlow asked the capacity ballroom crowd to raise their hands if they “thought Gmail was slow,” and a good number responded (before your Lifehacker editors could gain entrance). Perlow said that users with a huge number of active messages and regular incoming mail were seeing the slowest performance, and that the Gmail team was working on a fix for this conundrum.

In all matters of speed, Gmail takes speed very seriously. Before introducing drag and drop labeling, the Gmail team had a “show-stopping debate” about whether to have Gmail start processing a user’s action when they first clicked down to “pick up” the label, or activate when they released the button. As Product Manager Todd Jackson put it, “Mouse down versus mouse up was a show-stopping debate.” In general, Jackson said, new features can’t make the cut unless they’ve proven that their impact on the speed users experience is non-existent or very small.

The other big topic, as news-savvy readers might have guessed, was Google Buzz. This, too, was covered before we could get an in-person listen, but from news reports, the crowd’s tweets, and what was said starting 20 minutes in, the team members who worked on Buzz’s integration in Gmail were very honest, forthcoming, and aware of its flaws and the public’s apprehension about the new product.

Jackson told the crowd, as he’s previously said to reporters, that too much was assumed about how Buzz would work best and be received based on Google’s internal testing. Google employees didn’t have a strong use case for “muting” their fellow Google employees, and the people they’d want to follow and be followed by closely matched up to their contact lists. In general, too, Jackson suggested that Google underestimated the impact of “having a social, public service appear inside … what is a very private thing (email) for some people.” When the public response to Buzz’s shortcomings became apparent, the Buzz and Gmail teams immediately started work on fixing it.

During the Q&A session at the end, an attendee asked what technologies and methods the team used to change Buzz’s sign-up, privacy, and other controls so quickly after launching. The response from Edward Ho, a leader of the Google Buzz team that operates inside Gmail: “We have this amazing technology called work really, really hard.” Many Gmail and Buzz team members spent an entire weekend at their desks and slept at the office, panelists suggested. A notable future aspect of Buzz will be its launch for companies’ internal use in Google Apps, possibly in three or four months, but more testing and iterative improvements will occur before that happens.

Here’s the quick hits of what else was mentioned during the Gmail team’s panel:

• The team was asked if anything was being done for users struggling with switching between personal Gmail accounts and Google Apps accounts for work, and missing out on great features. Braden Kowitz, a user experience designer at Google, said that Google employees feel the same disconnect between their own Gmail and Google.com acounts, and that a “long and complicated process to fix that exact case” was in the works.
• There are plans to improve the “Contacts experience,” and, for at least one panel member, the missing features and ease of use issues “keeps me up at night” and “needs to get better.” That same panelist said they couldn’t get into details of the fixes, though.
• Gmail has experimented with placing “fewer, but better ads” inside the web interface, Arielle Reinstein, Gmail product marketing manager, told the crowd. On the whole, Gmail does “a pretty reasonable job of covering (its) costs,” Jackson said, despite being one of Google’s more expensive services to run, due to the free storage provided and multiple server backups offered.
• When determining which types of users and Gmail uses to develop features and fixes for, Gmail now tends toward “Five of seven-day users”—those frequent, devoted users who access their Gmail accounts five of seven days of the week.
• Asked whether Gmail would ever open up an API for developers to code add-ons and plug-ins with more official support and stability, Kowitz suggested it was unlikely. Gmail is based on “hundreds of thousands” of lines of JavaScript, Kowitz said, and it’s a code base that “changes so quickly.” That said, Jackson said the Gmail team “loves” to see third-party functionality being developed, and the team tries to make developers aware of changes they know will affect those products.
• Asked why Google Wave wasn’t built into Gmail, and if it might one day offer competition for Gmail itself, Jackson said that “We’d much rather cannibalize our own services than have other people do it.” Google tries to keep a hand in developing both improvements for its current products and “leap-frog projects.” Wave, Jackson said, could be such a leap-frog that “people will be using three, four years down the road.”
• Gmail adoption is growing faster internationally than in the U.S., Reinstein said, and holds the top spot in email usage in India at the moment, and the number three slot in the U.S., behind Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Gmail also changes up its feature list in different countries, so that in Ghana, for example, free SMS through Gmail chat is enabled by default, because text messages are more popular than email in that African nation for text communication.
• “People complain when we add features, and people complain if we remove features. If we don’t do anything to a product, people will complain, after a year or two, that nothing is improving.” That was Jackson’s smiling response to Gmail’s position in adding or taking away Labs or mainstream features. The answer, he said, was developing features that “do the greatest good for the greatest number of users.”
• Gmail team member Jonathan Perlow, capping off the discussion about Gmail’s speed with a laugh-getter: “People thought Gmail got faster when we changed the color. That was awesome.”

A big thanks to William Hertling and his extensive panel notes for helping us fill in the gaps in our own notepad.

What the Gmail Team Is Working On [Feature] from Lifehacker: top

Google’s Apps suite for domain owners and businesses has finally received some star treatment with the launch of the Apps Marketplace. Which Google-friendly apps are free, worth the cost, and entirely useful? These 10 are definitely worth a look.

10. Box.net

Box.net is one of many online file storage sites, but from its launch, it’s been focused on adding features that business and enterprise customers can use. Attached to your own web storage, Box.net’s features shine through. The service has many webapp partners that can fax, print, secure, edit, and otherwise handle all kinds of documents, and Box.net itself can integrate into many enterprise software packages, set up conference calls and web conferences centered around documents, and otherwise link together the files you’ve stashed away and the people who work on them. [Apps Marketplace link] Price: free for Box.net business users, $15 per user per month for new users.

9. SurveyMonkey

It’s an established tool that a lot of organizations are using to collect data on all kinds of topics. Better still, crafting a poll or questionnaire in SurveyMonkey will save you a good deal of time over crafting a spreadsheet and form in Google Docs and manipulating the results. If you needed more incentive, the “Basic” plan is free for groups looking to just do a little smart polling, and “Basic” covers a whole lot of data-swapping goodness. [Apps Marketplace link] Price: Free for basic version, $16.67 and up for advanced features.

8. SlideRocket

Google’s own Presentation app is one of those “Hey, it works” tools, and if you needed to write something up in a pinch, it’s there. SlideRocket, on the other hand, is a surprisingly full-featured presentation editor that doesn’t require a Microsoft license and can be pulled up wherever you or your team have web access. Like the Aviary photo editor (below), installing SlideRocket in your Apps space puts everyone on the same page and centralizes where those presentations get stored. Alas, SlideRocket doesn’t sing in every browser—it doesn’t play well with Firefox in Snow Leopard, for instance—but when it works, it’s pretty wow-inducing. [Apps Marketplace link] Price: 30-day free trial, $12 per user per month after that; Education and “lite” versions available.

7. Google Short Links

Why would you use Google’s own link shortening service for your Apps account over popular, free options like bit.ly or is.gd? Primarily because the links you can provide clients and partners—like GlobexIndustries.com/B2B—are more stately, feel safer, and haven’t already been snapped up on the major shortening servers. It also helps that you can make them far easier to remember than a random assortment of letters and numbers. It’s free, too, and that’s a pretty good selling point. [Apps Marketplace link] Price: Free.

6. Shared Contacts

It’s unfortunate that Google’s contacts manager doesn’t make it easy for people and businesses to create and update common sets of contacts—perhaps they consider that the stuff of big enterprise packages. Their loss is Shared Contacts’ gain. With the package installed, Apps domains can create new groups of contacts, set their read/write permissions, and have them show up for everybody in that group. It’s not a one-click process, it would appear, but once Shared Contacts is installed, you’ll likely never have to see or send email with “Phone #?” in the subject line. [Apps Marketplace link] Price: free trial available, $50 per year after that.

5. Gbridge

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a great thing to have. Having it free, and connected through your Google Apps’ chat service to your other computers and project partners, is way better. By hooking up Gbridge, on-the-go Apps users have access to shared files, backup through their own computers or those of others in their group, screen sharing and control for tech support or demonstration, and the kind of basic VPN access that can be oh so helpful. [Apps Marketplace link] Price: Free.

4. TripIt

Traveling is taxing enough on its own. Frantic text messages asking “When do u land?” and the like should be unnecessary. Implementing TripIt for your site or group will win you fans, because it’s like having an employee whose only job is to organize trips and keep everybody in the loop. As an individual app, TripIt does a great job turning travel confirmation emails into organized, mapped, linked-up itineraries. Installed on Apps, it enables Ted to see when Lisa is leaving and arriving, tells Bob when to pick her up at the airport and provides directions, and lets everyone know if the flight is delayed. [Apps Marketplace link] Price: free.

3. ManyMoon or Zoho Projects

For very small businesses, personal sites, and less goal-oriented groups, the free, socially adept ManyMoon may fit the bill for your project management needs. Group task management, tagging, micro-blogging for teams, and time tracking come with the free price tag. For larger organizations and those with a real need for deadlines, nested goals and tasks, and constant contact, Zoho Projects is a more robust and agile solution, one that integrates well into Google’s own app offerings—project deadlines and events, for instance, can be automatically added to team member’s calendars. Zoho can also serve as a kind of “project intranet,” providing wikis, shared file spaces, and even public web pages. [Apps Marketplace link: ManyMoon, Zoho Projects] Price: ManyMoon free; Zoho Projects free for one project, $12/month and up for unlimited users.

2. Aviary

At its own web site, Aviary hosts a very capable image editing suite that runs entirely inside a browser. Hooked into the files you’re already hosting and using on your site or in your group, it gives everybody a kind of Photoshop lite to work with, and avoids the worries of losing that one version of a graphic your client liked better. [Apps Marketplace link] Price: free.

1. OffiSync

It’s not for lack of trying, but Google’s web-based Docs app can’t do everything that Microsoft’s desktop Office suite can pull. Whether it’s revision tracking, macro recording, or database integration, you can skip the back-and-forth file swapping with the Apps version of OffiSync, a utility that does just what you might think. Save a file in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, and with OffiSync set up, it will save simultaneously to your Google Apps space. You get the feature-rich editing services of Office and the easy sharing and peace-of-mind storage of Google, all at once. [Apps Marketplace link] Price: free.

---

If you’re a Google Apps user who’s found something great in the Marketplace, or you’re looking for something that’s not there yet, we want to hear about it in the comments.
Top 10 Google Apps Marketplace Apps [Lifehacker Top 10] from Lifehacker: top

After extended use your earbuds get pretty dirty—both on the microscopic and the visible “that came out of my ear?” level. This simple guide will help you defunk your earbuds to keep your eyes happy and the tunes clear.

Photo by dusk-photography.

Earbuds can get dirty surprisingly fast, especially if you use in-ear earbuds—the sealed design increases the heat in the ear canal and leads to more ear wax and oils accumulating on the bud. You can’t just dunk them in water and shake them around however, especially if you spend big bucks on them to please your audiophile ears.

Over at the technology-centric blog GeekSugar they highlight several ways you can clean your ear buds:

• Use a gentle cleaner, like soap and warm water. No need to go too heavy-duty here; try a mix of dishwashing detergent and water. [Ed Note: To wipe! Not to dunk!]
• Use a gentle cloth with just a small amount of the soap mixture. Too much soap could leave a residue on your earbuds, and too much water, well that goes without saying.
• If there’s a lot of dirt or dust in the metal part of your earbuds, try brushing them with a dry toothbrush to dislodge the dust.

For more tips and techniques visit the article at the link below. If you have your own tips for cleaning earbuds, let’s hear about it in the comments.

Clean Your Earbuds for Better Sound and Hygiene [Headphones] from Lifehacker: top

If you like getting the most use out of your possessions as possible, this guide will help you turn a hooded sweatshirt into a laptop bag, baby carrier, and more.

Over at the design site Conceptual Devices, they have a project called Just Undo It that emphasizes the use of common objects in new and versatile ways. Check out the video below to see how they turn a hooded sweatshirt into a laptop bag:

In addition to the laptop bag video they have multiple photo tutorials available at the link below—including one for the laptop bag for those of you at a YouTube-unfriendly location. Check out the full site for guides on how to make a pillow, carryall, laptop bag, baby carrier, and more.

Turn a Hoodie into an Improvised Laptop Bag [Clever Uses] from Lifehacker: top

Dear Lifehacker,
I’ve read about how HTML5 will change the way I use the web, but it seems like the biggest example of HTML5 in action is on sites like YouTube—which don’t support my favorite browser, Firefox. What’s the deal?

I find myself, and I’m sure tons of others, caught in the Adobe Flash Player vs. HTML5 battle. Flash Player runs terribly on my iMac. Videos on different sites either tell me to install Flash components, show up as blank white areas, load perpetually (CNET TV) or tell me to adjust global storage, and so on. If they do play, I often get the stuttering/buffering that drives me crazy. I had the latest version of Flash Player, uninstalled that and installed the latest 10.1 Beta3, and it’s just as bad.

I considered signing up for YouTube’s HTML5 beta test, but that only works for Safari, Chrome, and IE, not Firefox. I’ve read about Mozilla’s stance on this issue, too.

I apologize for the long intro to my question, but do you know of any Firefox add-on or plug-in that installs the H.264 codec? We already have to install a plug-in for Flash Player, so perhaps it’s possible someone can do this for H.264.

Thanks for any help,
Fighting with Flash

Howdy Fighting,
That’s a good question, and unfortunately one to which there’s no great answer. It actually is technically possible to play HTML5 YouTube videos in Firefox, but it’s extremely convoluted (details below)—and Mac users like yourself won’t have any luck. First, for those who aren’t familiar with why Firefox is excluded from YouTube’s (and some other video sites’) HTML5 support, here’s why:

The Problem

In order to move to HTML5 from Flash, video sites like YouTube need to host their videos in formats friendly to Flash-free HTML5 embedding. Unfortunately there’s no default standard for the format HTML5 videos should use.

As a dedicated open-source, open-standards browser, Firefox chose to support the Ogg Theora video format for HTML5 video. Like Firefox, Ogg Theora is free and open; it’s not covered by any patents, so it requires no licensing and is completely free to use for everyone involved.

Other browser makers, like Chrome and Safari, support H.264 for HTML5 video. Unlike Ogg Theora, H.264 is patented, and would theoretically require browser makers to pay licensing fees to use it (though the company that owns licensing rights to H.264 have said that they’ll offer it royalty free until 2016). Additionally, the issue isn’t just about licensing.

Some tests have shown H.264 to perform better than Ogg Theora in side-by-side comparisons. Apple’s stance on the matter, via Wikipedia, is that “H.264 performs better and is already more widely supported.” For video sites like YouTube, the main concern is likely which format can deliver the highest quality video with the greatest compression rates. Unfortunately for Team Firefox (and supporters of free and open web standards), it’s looking like H.264 might deliver the best results.

It’s worth nothing that browsers can support multiple video formats for HTML5 support, but currently Chrome is the only browser that supports both H.264 and Ogg Theora (though through the Frankenstein efforts of Google Chrome Frame, Internet Explorer also gets support for both). The chart below (from Wikipedia) lays it all out:

As you can see, unless either Firefox changes its stance or sites like YouTube decide to support a free alternative like Ogg Theora, Firefox fanatics don’t have a clear way to watch HTML5 YouTube videos.

The “Solution”

If you’re extremely desperate to watch HTML5 YouTube videos but you absolutely do not want to switch to another browser, you’ve got one simple-yet-absurd solution that’ll only work on Windows:

Watch HTML5 YouTube Videos in Firefox (on Windows)

1. Install the IE Tab Firefox extension (or one of the other IE-in-Firefox extensions).
2. Install Google Chrome Frame for IE.
   
   
3. In the IE Tab preferences inside Firefox, set YouTube to always open inside an IE Tab (see image below).
   
4. Visit the YouTube HTML5 Video Player opt-in page (if you’ve set up IE Tab correctly above, it should open in an IE Tab inside Firefox) and click the Join the HTML5 Beta link at the bottom of the page.
   
5. Go watch an HTML5-supported YouTube video.

And… that’s it. Ridiculous, but I’ve tried it, and it seems to work. (Though, unsurprisingly, it seemed buggy, and worked much better in straight Chrome than it did in either IE with Chrome Frame or Firefox with IE and Chrome Frame.) Unfortunately it doesn’t help Mac users like Fighting with Flash much, but it’s the best we could do.

More than anything, the convoluted process involved in watching an HTML5 YouTube video in Firefox only serves to underscore the problem. It’s not something that’ll likely be solved overnight (though I guess if Mozilla decides to cave into H.264, change could come pretty quickly), but it’s a good reminder that important, web-changing technology almost always comes with a few speed bumps.

Love,
Lifehacker

Got a better method you’re using, or want to weigh in on this whole H.264 vs. Ogg Theora battle? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Can I Play HTML5 YouTube Videos in Firefox Right Now? [Ask Lifehacker] from Lifehacker: top

Math professor, programmer, and blogger John Cook discusses how work expands to fill the time allowed for it, and why the more trivial something is, the more time we waste discussing it.

Yesterday I found a copy of Parkinson’s Law for $1 at a library book sale. This book is best known for its opening line: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

The name “Parkinson’s Law” can mean at least four different things:

1. The 1957 book by C. Northcote Parkinson
2. The first chapter of Parkinson’s book
3. The principle expressed in the book’s opening line, as understood by Parkinson
4. The principle in the opening line as understood today.

I’d heard of the general principle of Parkinson’s Law a few years ago. I only found out about the book more recently. I didn’t know until last night that Parkinson intended his principle to be applied more narrowly than it is applied now.

The full title of the first chapter of the book is “Parkinson’s Law, or The Rising Pyramid.” This chapter explains how work expands to fill the available resources within a bureaucracy and why bureaucracies grow exponentially at a compounding rate of around 5% per year. The subtitle addresses the mechanism for this growth, bureaucrats creating a pyramid of subordinates. Parkinson derives his law from “two almost axiomatic statements”: An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals. Officials make work for each other.

Nowadays Parkinson’s Law is usually condensed to saying work expands to the time allowed. It is applied to individuals as well as a burgeoning bureaucracies. Parkinson discusses this interpretation in his opening paragraph but then limits his attention to organizations.

The total effort that would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety, and toil.

Chapter 3 of Parkinson’s Law is “High Finance, or The Point of Vanishing Interest.” This chapter is the source of the phrase bike shed arguments. In this chapter Parkinson states what he calls the Law of Triviality:

… the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

The idea is that people are more likely to contribute to the discussion of things they understand. A nuclear reactor will sail through the finance committee, but a bicycle shed will cause endless debate because everyone can understand it and everyone has an opinion.

"Work Expands to the Time Allowed" [Quotables] from Lifehacker: top