Older Than You Think, Part 2: Productivity Rules and Where They Come From

Part one traced life advice back to where it was written. This one does the same for work: the rules, razors and laws that fill productivity posts and management slides.

The pattern is different here. Life advice tends to be older than it looks. Productivity advice tends to be older in its idea and newer in its name, and the name often carries a claim the original never made.

01The verdicts

All ✕Doesn't hold up◐Partly✓Holds up?Can't confirm

01 “Less is more” is older than modern minimalist design ✓Holds up Older than modernism.

02 Delegation advice (you can't do everything yourself) is ancient ✓Holds up It is in Exodus 18. Moses's father-in-law Jethro watches him settle disputes from morning to evening and tells him: The thing that thou doest is not good … thou art not able to perform it thyself alone.

03 “Work smarter, not harder” is older than start-up culture ?Can't confirm We could not date it.

04 “Early to bed and early to rise” is older than Benjamin Franklin ✓Holds up Older than Franklin. Franklin's Poor Richard repeats it, but W.

05 “Time is money” is older than Benjamin Franklin ✓Holds up Franklin wrote Remember that time is money in 1748, in Advice to a Young Tradesman.

06 “Work expands to fill the time available” is a real, dated law ◐Partly The sentence is real and dated; the law is something else.

07 Occam's razor: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” (William of Ockham) ◐Partly The idea is medieval; the famous sentence is not his.

08 The 80/20 rule is a law discovered by Pareto ◐Partly Vilfredo Pareto studied the unequal distribution of income in his Cours d'économie politique (1896–97) and fitted a curve to it.

09 Hanlon's razor: never attribute to malice what stupidity explains ◐Partly The name is from 1980, when Robert J.

10 “Impostor syndrome” is a real psychological condition ◐Partly The experience is real; the diagnosis is not.

11 The Dunning-Kruger chart: “Mount Stupid”, the valley of despair, the slope of enlightenment ✕Doesn't hold up That curve is not in the research.

6 of 11 shown · a mix of every verdict Show all 11 ▾

02When a rule gets promoted to a law

Three of these are worth reading together: the 80/20 rule, Parkinson’s law and Hanlon’s razor.

• Pareto studied how unequally income was spread and fitted a curve to it. The quality-control engineer Joseph Juran later gave Pareto’s name to a general principle, the “vital few and trivial many”, and in 1974 wrote: “I was forced to confess that I had mistakenly applied the wrong name to the principle.”
• C. Northcote Parkinson, a historian and satirist, opened a 1955 essay about the growth of government staff with the line people now quote. He called it “a commonplace observation”; his law was about the number of officials.
• Robert Heinlein gave a character in a 1941 story a line about villainy and stupidity. In 1980 a similar line was printed as “Hanlon’s razor”, named after the man who sent it in.

In each case a shrewd observation picked up the authority of a law, largely by being given a formal-sounding name. Our reading: they work well as prompts to look again, and less well as laws. A split you meet at work may not be anywhere near 80/20, and sometimes a problem really is somebody’s bad faith.

80/20 rule	Pareto studied income; Juran gave the principle Pareto's name and wrote in 1974 that it was the wrong name.
Parkinson's law	A 1955 essay's opening “commonplace observation”; the law itself was about the number of officials.
Hanlon's razor	Heinlein's 1941 line about villainy and stupidity; the name is from 1980.
Occam's razor	The idea is Ockham's; the wording, substantially, is John Ponce's, 1639.

The name often carries a claim the original never made.

03The chart that was never in the study

The Dunning-Kruger curve is a case of a picture standing in for a finding.

The 1999 study, by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, tested people on humour, grammar and logic. Those who scored in the bottom quarter “grossly overestimated their test performance and ability”: their scores put them in the 12th percentile, and they placed themselves in the 62nd. The paper’s figures plot each quarter’s perceived ability against its actual test score. It has no peak of overconfidence, no valley of despair and no slope of enlightenment.

How big the effect is remains argued over. Kruger and Dunning wrote that they believed “the overestimation we observed was more psychological than artifactual”. A 2020 study by Gignac and Zajenkowski, using different statistical tests on 929 people’s self-rated intelligence, concluded that “the magnitude of the effect may be much smaller than reported previously”. A 2021 study by Jansen, Rafferty and Griffiths, a large-scale replication with about 4,000 people in each of two studies, found support for low performers being less able to judge whether their answers were right, in grammar and logical reasoning. The studies disagree about method, so we leave the size of the effect open.

04The oldest one is the most practical

The delegation passage in Exodus 18 is a few verses long. A leader settles every dispute himself “from the morning unto the evening”. His father-in-law, Jethro, tells him: “Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee”. The fix is a structure: “rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens”, with “the hard causes” brought to Moses and the small matters judged by the others. It reads like a consultant’s report on an overloaded manager.

05Using these rules without leaning on them too hard

A few ways to get the useful part of each rule while keeping its origin in mind:

• 80/20: treat it as a question, not a fact. Which few things account for most of the result here, and what is the split really?
• Parkinson’s law: the sentence is a joke with a point. A deadline can stop a task spreading, and it is worth remembering that Parkinson’s own subject was offices adding staff.
• Hanlon’s razor: before assuming someone meant harm, it is worth asking whether a misunderstanding or a mistake would explain it, which is Goethe’s point too. It is a first question, not a verdict.
• Delegation: Jethro’s version is concrete. Decide which kinds of question the leader keeps, and who handles the rest.
• Impostor feelings: the 1978 paper describes a pattern, not an illness. A 2020 review found the feelings often come alongside depression and anxiety, and those are matters for a doctor or counsellor rather than for a productivity rule.

How we checked this · Last checked September 2026

• Each idea was traced to the earliest texts and studies listed below.
• For "work smarter, not harder" we found no dated early printing, and we could not run a full-text search of historical newspapers.

Checked September 2026.

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06Sources