We've talked about why things always take longer than we plan before, but Emily Guy Birken at Wise Bread suggests a way to avoid underestimating how long something will take you.
Birken describes what's called the "planning fallacy," a phenomenon that happens to most of us when we plan certain tasks. Basically, we tend to underestimate how long something will take us to complete, even if we have experience doing the same task with a longer completion time. Birken shares some advice a friend gave her on how to systematically overcome the issue:
When planning a project, increase the amount of time that you estimate it will take by doubling the number and going up to the next time unit. This is safer than simply adding additional days (or weeks, or months) to the estimate you come up with because it leaves time for seriously disruptive delays.
It doesn't take much additional thought to plan things out this way, and it covers you on a couple bases. It feels pretty awful to take longer to do something when you said it would be done by a certain time.
This is Why Your Projects Always Take Longer Than You Expect | Wise Bread
Photo by Kayla Kandzorra .
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