The laws of the office revisited
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 30.5K Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If something is going wrong in your workplace, there's probably a law that explains why. Meetings always seem long, and never end early? There’s Parkinson’s Law, which says work expands to the time allotted, or, restated: meetings will always take up all the time blocked on Outlook calendars. Is your boss bad at managing? Check the Peter Principle, which says people are promoted to their level of incompetence. A good worker does not a good manager make. And yet … here we are. Once you hear these laws, and a few others, you start to spot them everywhere.
Today on the show, we picked a few of the most famous and powerful ‘laws of the office’ and tested them out on each other.
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This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone, Sarah Gonzalez, and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Bryant Urstadt edited this show. Planet Money’s executive producer is Alex Goldmark.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sarah, Sarah Gonzalez, my longest colleague. |
| 0:04.0 | Do you remember a long time ago an episode that you and I did together where I confessed to a minor... |
| 0:11.0 | A crime. You confessed to a crime. |
| 0:13.0 | I would say malfeasance. I confessed to some malfeasance. Whatever. |
| 0:18.0 | You broke a rule. |
| 0:19.0 | I definitely broke a rule. |
| 0:20.0 | Flash thaw. You know, potato potato. I definitely broke a rule. And... Slash law. |
| 0:40.2 | You know, potato potato. I mean exactly where you're going. Do you remember that episode? Of course. You were like not scanning groceries? Well, we don't have to get into the specifics because we're about to run the episode that that is about. Okay. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I remember. It's like the one and only time, Kenny broke a rule, I think. Certainly the only one I've confessed to on tape. And then, do you remember what that episode was about overall? No, what is it? Well, so the episode was about my crime, I contend and will contend in this episode we're about to run was about incentives and incentives |
| 0:55.3 | going rogue perverse incentives yeah yeah so this episode was a bunch of those and uh it was from a long |
| 1:02.5 | time ago but may i share the very exciting news all right ready i'm going to show you i'm going to show |
| 1:07.3 | you something because this relates to the new Planet Money book. Are you ready? |
| 1:12.9 | Look at this. |
| 1:16.0 | Oh, the Laws of the Office episode. |
| 1:23.2 | This is a poster, like an industrial safety poster that you would see next to a water cooler. A hundred percent. |
| 1:25.0 | But this is custom made for only very special Planet Money book buyers. And it is the laws of the office. It's the laws that you're about to hear in this episode, but put into a useful water cooler, like, safety poster. And you can point to your colleagues obnoxiously when you're like, you know, you're really, really doing Parkinson's law right now or really good arts law going on over there. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is like wash the dishes in the communal sink post-stick-sticky note version. Yes. It's like a version of that. So like don't, don't be that employee. Don't be that coworker. Yes. and all of these particular laws, as you will hear, have some kind of economic backing to them. |
| 2:05.5 | That's what today's episode is about. |
| 2:07.0 | But the important information here is this is a special edition poster, only available. |
| 2:11.2 | Limited edition, only for people who pre-order the Planet Money Book. |
| 2:15.2 | And the way that you do that is you go to planetmoneybook.com. And if you miss the link, don't worry, we will say it plenty more times. Okay, so here's the episode that inspired the poster that you can get when you pre-order the Planet Money book. I'm excited to hear it. It's good. It was good. It was very fun. Here you go. Here's the episode. |
| 2:35.9 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 2:40.9 | Sarah, did you look up the thing? |
| 2:43.9 | I looked up the thing. The statute of limitations in Pennsylvania for misdemeanors is two years. Two years. That's it? Yeah. So can you tell us |
... |
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