Overcome the “planning Fallacy” to Become More Productive
Even if you’ve never heard of the planning fallacy, you’ve probably encountered it. This is the phenomenon in which a person or team underestimates how long a task will take and how much it will cost in money or resources, and overestimates the actual benefits it will bring. If you’ve ever waited until the last minute to respond to an email and then discovered that you don’t have the data you need to send a decent response, you’ve fallen victim to a fallacy. Heck, you’ve been a victim of this if you’ve ever been late for something because you were just confident that traffic wouldn’t stop you from getting there, even though there’s always traffic on that route at that time – but there are ways back off.
What to do about planning error?
As mentioned, the planning fallacy is simply a pattern of faulty thinking that results in people planning their time and expectations incorrectly. You have no idea how long a task will actually take, how much you’ll have to spend on it, or how little you might get out of it. The fallacy itself was first proposed by economist Daniel Kahneman and cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky in 1979, but was expanded in 2003 to include overestimation of useful outcomes.
Over the years, this has been studied and proven by other great minds who have concluded that it is all part of the optimism bias , which causes people to look ahead through rose-colored glasses instead of thinking realistically about their plans and expected results.
All of this means that in general, when you plan your day or your projects, you’re probably strategizing around the best-case scenario—a small investment of time and resources with a high return—rather than the worst-case scenario. . This means that if (perhaps when ) something goes wrong, you are not prepared.
How to overcome the planning fallacy
First, you need to set a realistic goal. You can do this by using a SMART goal or a FAST goal , both of which require you to write down a specific goal and specify how exactly you will measure your progress towards it. A SMART goal is preferred over a FAST goal here because you will also be including a time-based element in this structure; The “T” in SMART stands for “time constraint,” and this will be critical to eliminating the planning fallacy. You need to determine in advance what your deadline is. But for this you need to be a realist, not an optimist.
Consider projects you have worked on that are similar in demand or scope to your current one. How long did they take you? No, really, how long did they actually take you? To be realistic about how long a new project will take, you need to learn from the past, and things may not go perfectly this time if you don’t have reliable data. Start tracking your time once you start working on a project and its associated tasks. Use the 168-hour method to carefully track your time throughout the week, paying attention to how long each step of your project’s process actually takes. When you complete a project, conduct a personal impact analysis , analyzing what you wanted to achieve, what you actually achieved, and what prevented you from achieving it, then take notes and save them with the project itself.
By tracking your time and assessing what went wrong that prevented you from completing a task on time and productively in the past, you can better structure your future to-do lists and schedules. You may not be able to overcome the planning bug on the first try, but after several attempts in which you collect and analyze data, you will have a better understanding of how much time your work is taking and eventually be able to overcome it.
Another key to defeating delusion is to avoid anchoring, or cognitive bias, that prevents people from changing their original course of action. If halfway through a project you realize that a planning mistake has caused you to be too optimistic, make a conscious decision to consider changing your goal, schedule, or approach. Seek the opinions of colleagues or colleagues, weigh their input fairly and adjust it if necessary. Apart from optimism, people also tend to be stubborn, but neither of these helps when you are trying to achieve a goal. Becoming aware of these cognitive biases and misconceptions is a solid first step to overcoming them, but ultimately you will have to work to do so.