According to “Hofstadter’s law” (below) it is a known fact that any task that you are planning will take longer than expected. Now it is not talking about tasks that you do on a regular basis and you know how much time it will take.
This would be a new project that you are planning, like painting the kitchen. Even though you know how much paint you would need, if you have never painted that kitchen you are just estimating how much time it will take. Even padding the time, more likely than not, will not be enough.
According to “The Planning Fallacy” our minds have some sort of distortion when considering the task to be able to estimate correctly the length of time to complete it. Apparently we focus more on the overall task and not on all of the sub components it takes to complete it.
I know for me, and I am a time management freak, that I often will think that I can complete way more in a day than possible. I really think it is possible when I begin, but at the end of the day I did not accomplish all of my tasks.
When I take the time to review what happened 9 times out of 10 there where things I did not take into consideration when planning. Simple things, like answering the phone, eating lunch, or other daily tasks.
I guess we can think a bit distortedly even when we think we are planning very well. This is such an interesting topic because it happens to all of us.
How do you think we might be able to handle Hofstadter’s law better?
Hofstadter’s law, conceived by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, goes like this: any task you’re planning to complete will always take longer than expected – even when Hofstadter’s law is taken into account. Even if you know a project will overrun, and build that knowledge into your planning, it’ll simply overrun your new estimated finish time, too. This is referred to as the “Planning Fallacy.”
The Planning Fallacy is a cognitive bias–or a distortion in the human mind that has been well documented by psychologists. According to the studies, we know everything always takes longer than expected; we just seem to forget … again and again.
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