Bikeshedding⁠↗

Bikeshedding, also known as Parkinson’s law of triviality, describes our tendency to devote a disproportionate amount of our time to menial and trivial matters while leaving important matters unattended.

Bikeshedding can negatively impact us because it causes us to manage our time inefficiently by disproportionately allocating time among tasks. We end up spending too long on trivial tasks and leave ourselves no time to complete the more complex tasks, which tend to be more important in the grand scheme of things. This hurts our productivity, potential, and mental well-being.

This tendency to prioritize inconsequential details can make us short-sighted, creating negative consequences for our future selves.6 When you waste valuable time focusing on minor issues, you’re left scrambling at the last minute to get things done—perhaps sacrificing quality in the process. On the other hand, maybe you neglect important tasks altogether, perpetually procrastinating by adding small tasks to your to-do list and pushing complex responsibilities out of view completely. As a result, you might miss critical deadlines and face negative consequences like financial penalties or damage to your professional reputation.

Bikeshedding is a big problem in group settings because simple issues entice multiple people to speak, which can drag them out. By only including the necessary number of people, trivial issues will take up less time, if they happen to come up at all. Even better, make sure the right people are present for the meeting. The presence of subject matter experts will help keep the conversation focused and ensure the group has all the information needed to make a confident, informed decision.

The term bikeshedding comes from Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a British naval historian most famous for Parkinson’s law, which posits that work expands to fill the time allocated to it. For instance, if you allocate an hour to a task that actually only takes 30 minutes, the task will still end up acquiring the complexity of an hour-long task.

In particular, Parkinson’s law of triviality states that the amount of time spent discussing an issue in an organization is inversely proportional to its actual importance in the grand scheme of things. In other words, the less important an issue is, the more time is spent on it.