It will take longer than you think
What will? Work assignments. Construction projects. Missions to Mars.
President Trump has pledged to send astronauts to Mars. But getting it done in just a few years isn’t so simple. It’s a classic case of the planning fallacy.
The planning fallacy states that we’re really bad at estimating the cost and time required to complete a project. Here’s an explanation from a 2003 Harvard Business Review piece (gift link) by Dan Lovallo, a professor at the University of Sydney, and the late Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist and Nobel laureate:
“In its grip, managers make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, managers pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time—or to ever deliver the expected returns.”
The planning fallacy is why work projects drag on long after we thought they would.
I’ve learned this lesson over and over again. And yet, I’m still tempted by that optimistic voice in my head that says: Go ahead, set that unrealistic deadline. You can cross off everything on your to-do list in a single workday.
Yeah, right.
Elon Musk routinely shows signs of the planning fallacy, predicting the expansion of self-driving cars every year since 2019. “Obviously, my predictions on this have been overly optimistic in the past,” he conceded last summer. In 2016, he said people could land on Mars “in about 10 years, maybe sooner, maybe nine years.”
Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, I remember hearing about a major highway project called the “Big Dig.” It seemed perpetually “almost done.” In the end, the Big Dig was a planning fallacy all-star, eight years late and $12.2 billion over the initial budget.
What’s driving our delusional optimism? Lovallo and Kahneman laid out a number of cognitive biases at play. Humans are notoriously optimistic. We’re likely to credit ourselves for successes while chalking up failures to external factors. We think we’re in control of much more than we actually are.
And in the workplace, we’re pressured to present a rosy outlook.
“Every company has only a limited amount of money and time to devote to new projects. Competition for this time and money is intense, as individuals and units jockey to present their own proposals as being the most attractive for investment. Because forecasts are critical weapons in these battles, individuals and units have big incentives to accentuate the positive in laying out prospective outcomes.”
How to manage the planning fallacy.
To start, I’ve found it helps to accept the existence of the planning fallacy. Once you do, you can think differently about the timelines you and others set.
Here are two ways you can do that:
Add additional time to a project, giving yourself a more realistic deadline that won’t leave you and others discouraged. The more complex the project, the more extra time you should add.
Set that ambitious—perhaps too ambitious—deadline. But build in a caveat that you can push it if needed.
Here’s another idea from Cal Newport. In his latest book, Slow Productivity, Newport suggested setting a policy of doubling your project deadlines.
“The fear here, of course, is that by doubling these timelines, you’ll drastically reduce what you accomplish. But your original plans were never realistic or sustainable in the first place. A key tenet of slow productivity is that grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. This path is long. Pace yourself.”
As you plan your next assignment, just remember: It will take longer than you think.
Thanks for reading.
Eric