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MONEY, WORK & LEADERSHIP · 11 POINTS LOOKED INTO

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

Work smarter not harder, the 80/20 rule, Occam's razor, Parkinson's law, impostor syndrome and the famous Dunning-Kruger chart. Eleven productivity ideas, traced to when and where they were born.

HOVER A GLOWING POINT · DRAG TO TURN
  • Myth 1
  • Partly true 5
  • True 4
  • Unverified 1
Published
September 16, 2026
Updated
September 30, 2026
Read
5 min
points
11
What we found Read the article

BACKGROUND · GIOVANNI BATTISTA CARACCIOLO, THE CALLING OF SAINT MATTHEW, C. 1625–30 · THE MET, OPEN ACCESS

THE SHORT VERSION

  1. Eleven productivity ideas traced to their origin. Four hold up as stated, five have a real idea under a newer name or a changed meaning, one famous chart was never in the research, and one we could not date.
  2. The Dunning-Kruger “Mount Stupid” chart is not in the 1999 study. The paper plots four groups of test-takers, and how big the effect is remains disputed.
  3. “Work expands so as to fill the time available” opens a 1955 essay in The Economist. Parkinson called it “a commonplace observation”; his law was about the number of officials.
  4. Delegation advice is in Exodus 18. Jethro tells Moses he cannot judge every case himself: “thou art not able to perform it thyself alone”.
  5. We could not date “work smarter, not harder”. It is often traced to the 1930s, but we found no dated early printing.

What we found

Our reading of the evidence on each of the 11 points, with where it comes from. Open any row, look at the source, and make up your own mind.

True“Less is more” is older than modern minimalist design

Older than modernism. The phrase is in Robert Browning's 1855 poem Andrea del Sarto: Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. The architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe later became famous for it as his dictum.

SOURCE Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto (1855); Christian Science Monitor (2012) on Mies.

TrueDelegation advice (you can't do everything yourself) is ancient

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. His fix is a structure: rulers of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens, with only the hard cases brought to Moses.

SOURCE Exodus 18:13–26, King James Version.

Unverified“Work smarter, not harder” is older than start-up culture

We could not date it. The phrase is often traced online to the 1930s and to the industrial engineer Allan Mogensen, whose Work Simplification Conferences began in 1937. We found no dated printing from him, or from the 1930s, that confirms the date or the author, and we could not run a full-text search of historical newspapers.

SOURCE Ben S. Graham, “Allan Mogensen and his Legacy” (2008); no dated early printing found.

True“Early to bed and early to rise” is older than Benjamin Franklin

Older than Franklin. Franklin's Poor Richard repeats it, but W. Carew Hazlitt's dictionary of English proverbs lists Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise from John Clarke's 1639 collection, Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina. Hazlitt also cites a 1598 book calling the Latin Sanat, sanctificat, et ditat, surgere mane (rising early makes you healthy, holy and rich) “an infallible Rule”.

SOURCE W. Carew Hazlitt, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases (1907), citing Clarke (1639); Franklin, The Way to Wealth.

True“Time is money” is older than Benjamin Franklin

Franklin wrote Remember that time is money in 1748, in Advice to a Young Tradesman. But the phrase was already in print in 1719, in the periodical The Free-Thinker, and the idea is ancient: Plutarch mentions what Antiphon calls the most costly outlay, namely, time.

SOURCE Quote Investigator, “Time is Money” (2010); Plutarch, Life of Antony 28.

Partly true“Work expands to fill the time available” is a real, dated law

The sentence is real and dated; the law is something else. It opens an essay in The Economist of 19 November 1955, printed as the work of “a correspondent”; its author was the historian C. Northcote Parkinson. He introduces the line as a commonplace observation. His law is about staff: the number of the officials and the quantity of the work to be done are not related to each other at all. Parkinson later said he took from G. K. Chesterton “the whole idea of conveying serious thoughts in the form of a joke”.

SOURCE “Parkinson's Law”, The Economist, 19 November 1955; Contemporary Authors via Encyclopedia.com.

Partly trueOccam's razor: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” (William of Ockham)

The idea is medieval; the famous sentence is not his. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says the sentiment is Ockham's but this formulation “is nowhere to be found in his texts”. In 1918 W. M. Thorburn traced the wording, substantially as we know it, to the Scotist commentator John Ponce (Punch) of Cork, writing in 1639, who called it illud axioma vulgare: a common axiom that the scholastics used often.

SOURCE Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “William of Ockham”; W. M. Thorburn, “The Myth of Occam's Razor”, Mind (1918).

Partly trueThe 80/20 rule is a law discovered by Pareto

Vilfredo Pareto studied the unequal distribution of income in his Cours d'économie politique (1896–97) and fitted a curve to it. The story that he found 80% of Italy's land owned by 20% of the people is one we could not find in an OCR search of both volumes of the Cours; we did not search his other works. The general “Pareto principle” was named by the quality-control engineer Joseph Juran, who wrote in 1974 that he had “mistakenly applied the wrong name to the principle”. It is a rule of thumb, not a law of nature.

SOURCE Vilfredo Pareto, Cours d'économie politique (1896–97); Joseph M. Juran, “The Non-Pareto Principle; Mea Culpa” (1974).

Partly trueHanlon's razor: never attribute to malice what stupidity explains

The name is from 1980, when Robert J. Hanlon, a computer programmer, sent the line in and Arthur Bloch printed it in Murphy's Law Book Two. The idea is older. Robert Heinlein's 1941 story Logic of Empire has You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity, and Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) observes that misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness.

SOURCE Quote Investigator (2016), on Bloch (1980); Heinlein (1941); Goethe (1774), trans. Boylan.

Partly true“Impostor syndrome” is a real psychological condition

The experience is real; the diagnosis is not. Psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes described it in 1978 as the impostor phenomenon, in a paper on high-achieving women who believed they had fooled everyone. A 2020 systematic review found it common among both men and women, and noted that it “is not a recognized psychiatric disorder”: it is not in the DSM or the ICD-10.

SOURCE Clance & Imes, Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice (1978); Bravata and others, Journal of General Internal Medicine (2020).

MythThe Dunning-Kruger chart: “Mount Stupid”, the valley of despair, the slope of enlightenment

That curve is not in the research. Justin Kruger and David Dunning's 1999 paper tested people on humour, grammar and logic and found the lowest scorers overestimated their performance badly. Its figures plot quarters of test-takers; there is no peak, valley or slope. The size of the effect is also disputed: a 2020 study argued it “may be much smaller than reported previously”, while a 2021 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.

SOURCE Kruger & Dunning, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1999); Gignac & Zajenkowski, Intelligence (2020); Jansen, Rafferty & Griffiths, Nature Human Behaviour (2021).

THE ARTICLE · 5 MIN

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.

When 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.

The 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.

The 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.

Using 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.

Sources

Checked September 2026. If you can date any of these earlier, with a source: hacksvitae@gmail.com

Related: Older Than You Think, Part 1 · Mental models, checked · Motivation vs discipline

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Hacks Vitae. "Older Than You Think, Part 2: Productivity Rules and Where They Come From." September 16, 2026. https://www.hacksvitae.com/life-hack/older-than-you-think-part-2-productivity-rules-and-where-they-come-from

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