Author might want to read peopleware, which had an entire chapter claiming that Parkinson's law does_not_ work for software projects.
The key take away is that Parkinson's law works on small tasks that don't fit into normal workflow. The author's examples are actually all this! The author gave the example of the due date for the survey. That's a 5-10 minute task. This is where the law applies. It means a task, as in, less than an hour of work, will get done on the due date. It does NOT mean that a project, a multi-person, multi-week thing, will get done on the deadline.
So all the author's examples are correct, but then the author extrapolates to projects, and that's where everything falls apart.
The key take away is that Parkinson's law works on small tasks that don't fit into normal workflow. The author's examples are actually all this! The author gave the example of the due date for the survey. That's a 5-10 minute task. This is where the law applies. It means a task, as in, less than an hour of work, will get done on the due date. It does NOT mean that a project, a multi-person, multi-week thing, will get done on the deadline. So all the author's examples are correct, but then the author extrapolates to projects, and that's where everything falls apart.