Work expands to fill the space allotted

by Tom Johnson on Apr 26, 2026
categories: writing

Last year I had a goal of getting down to bug zero and started a whole series on this quest. If this is the first you’re hearing of this goal, bug zero really means clearing out all doc requests (~JIRA tickets), finishing them. It’s similar to the idea of inbox zero, but with work.

I actually hit a brief moment where I hit bug zero, and I felt pretty accomplished. But within 1 or 2 days of clearing out that bug queue, it filled back up to 10 bugs, and then 20, and then 30.

While I was watching the bug count I’d worked so hard to reduce just refill so easily, I came across this video. It’s of a retired gentleman giving advice to someone 20 years younger.

The point that resonates most with me is this: work fills any space you give it. The bugs will naturally just fill up in your queue because you’re there, as a resource for others. But also, the work will fill all the time you give it as well.

The last couple of weeks I had some late soccer pickups, with my kid having practice until 8:00 pm. I usually pick her up on my way home from work, so I decided to just drive all the way in to work and hang out until about 7:30 pm, then drive to pick her up on my way home.

This took me out of my usual schedule, which involves driving to the train (Sounder), taking the train to downtown (King Street Station), and then biking the rest of the way to work (only a few miles to South Lake Union). It turns out that biking to work puts me on a more fixed schedule with the train because the last Sounder train out of the city is at 6:30 pm. I’d somehow forgotten the value of a regular schedule.

Staying at work until past 7 pm put me in a different mindset at work. Not only was I working late, I also started doing some various tasks on the weekends (writing up that weekly report, finishing that doc update I didn’t quite finalize, etc.). In short, I let work start to fill up more of the gaps in my schedule outside of work.

I thought I could push through all those doc tickets and maybe get to bug zero, but guess what — those doc tickets almost never seem to go away. They fill up endlessly, like a plumbing leak that just keeps pooling up water somewhere.

This same principle is why the promise of AI freeing up our schedules is an illusion. The idea of using AI to permanently clear out work is flawed, because work just expands to fill the newly available space. We think AI is going to help us finally reach bug zero or give us our afternoons back, but it really just helps us do more work faster.

Jevons paradox is coming to mind here. If you make a process easier to use, more people will use it. With docs, if you find a way to author content faster, it doesn’t mean you’ll reduce your workload. Instead, that expanded bandwidth will be consumed by more work that comes to you. Even outside of doc requests, maybe you’ll find more issues to address, more errors to fix, more problems to tackle.

It’s like adding a new lane on a freeway — the new lane (bandwidth) just gets filled up with more cars (work). AI might have cleared up some new lanes for us, but those new lanes aren’t empty. They’re full of new cars driving down them. Just as cars expand to fill the space of freeways, so too does work expand to fill the new bandwidth we grant it in our lives.

To use a metaphor, work is like a black vapor that expands into any space it’s allowed to move into. Open that door and the black vapor soon fills the entire room. It’s like a gas that expands to fill any space homogeneously, spreading its entropy across the universe.

I need to avoid letting work expand like this, mostly by putting fixed guardrails around my time at work. I stopped driving all the way to work and staying late just because of an 8 pm soccer pickup. Instead, I always ride my bike. For extra time, I might wander around the club facility or do other errands or tasks outside of work, or to sit down at a cafe and write. I like the fixed schedule bookended by the Sounder’s timetable and sticking more closely to that schedule, letting it structure my life.

I might also be ending this doc bug zero series too. I’ll prioritize my doc work and get through as much as I can, but I’m done opening that after-work door to let the black vapor fill my house and life, or filling my head with ideas of finishing everything in my queue.

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See the follow-up to this post, On pace and value – why is moving slow boring?.