Sources: https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/bikeshedding and BE Thoughtful podcast.
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.
Do you ever remember sitting in class and having a teacher get off track from a lesson plan? They may have spent a large portion of your biology class time telling you a personal story and skimmed over important scientific theory. In such an instance, your teacher may have been a victim of bikeshedding, where they spent too long discussing something minor and lost track of what was important. Even though it may have been more entertaining to listen to their story, it did not help you acquire important information.
Although that scenario is one familiar to most, bikeshedding is an issue most commonly seen as a problem in corporate and consulting environments, especially during meetings. Imagine that at work, you have a meeting scheduled to discuss two important issues. The first issue is having to come up with ways in which the company can reduce carbon emissions. The second issue is discussing the implementation of standing desks at the office. It is clear that the first issue is more important, but it is also more complex. You and your coworkers will likely find it much easier to talk about whether or not to get standing desks, and as a result, a large portion of the scheduled meeting time is devoted to this more trivial matter. This disproportionate time allocation is known as bikeshedding and causes complicated matters to receive little attention.
Bikeshedding can have negative consequences on personal productivity because it causes us to manage time inefficiently. Every day, we have various tasks that we have to complete and bikeshedding causes us to disproportionately allocate time to these 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. Bikeshedding causes us to be short-sighted with our time allocation, going with the easiest task first because we think it will take less time to complete.
For example, if our to-do list for the day includes going to the grocery store, folding the laundry, and submitting our tax forms, we may spend more time getting groceries and folding laundry because these are easy, menial tasks. By the time we get around to submitting the tax forms, we barely have enough time left. As a result of bikeshedding, we have put off the most important task and wasted our time on things that are easy to check off our to-do list.
Bikeshedding is most dangerous when it occurs in group settings because each individual ends up devoting more time to simple tasks, causing the overall time spent on trivial matters to snowball.
Our tendency to focus on trivial issues causes companies to operate at a suboptimal level because they do not allocate their time efficiently. This causes important proposals to take much longer than necessary to come to fruition, as they are left unattended for too long.
Bikeshedding can also cause the final product of a project to suffer because the team has spent most of its time working on small, simple parts of the project instead of the important complex parts. For example, in designing a flyer, a team may spend a long time picking out the font and color of text, leaving them with less time to decide on the text to include on the flyer, which is more important.
Bikeshedding occurs because trivial tasks are easier to comprehend than more complex issues; consequently, we feel more comfortable working on and discussing the simple issue.
In corporate settings, we are often asked to voice our opinions. It is much easier for us to spend time discussing an issue that we understand and that we know other people understand. We feel competent taking a stance on a topic we understand and use the opportunity to contribute.1 Other people then also want to contribute to show that they are listening and being an active member of a team, causing too much time to be spent discussing a trivial matter. These opinions often don’t actually add much value to the discussion and cause us to waste our time. By attempting to sound smart and voice our opinions, we shy away from major issues.
Another reason behind bikeshedding may be that we believe that the people putting forward a complex issue have a better understanding of it than we do.2 We don’t want to be the ones responsible for a complex matter and end up relying on the idea that someone else must already have spent time looking into it.
It is important to be aware of bikeshedding because it helps identify instances in which a valuable resource – time – is being wasted on trivial matters. Bikeshedding means that we are operating at a suboptimal efficiency and may not complete everything that we have set out to resolve.
Bikeshedding has implications in both our personal and group settings. Because of its ubiquity in our lives, it is vital that we try to counter the effects of bikeshedding. On a personal level, it affects our to-do lists and our individual goals. It can also influence our personal work productivity because we get off track by getting sucked into easy components of an assigned task. This impacts both efficiency and the final product.
For example, imagine that you are asked to write an article about Einstein’s theory of relativity. The theory of relativity is difficult to understand, so you spend a disproportionate amount of space in the article talking about Albert Einstein’s personal life, and only a few lines about the scientific breakthrough. Bikeshedding has caused not only your productivity to suffer, but the finished article as well, as it focuses on issues that are easy to understand and may not enhance your reader’s knowledge and understanding.