Starting
The planning fallacy
People reliably underestimate how long their own tasks will take.
When students in one study were asked when they would finish their thesis, most finished later than they predicted — on average later even than their own "if everything goes wrong" guess.
We plan from the best-case story of the task and forget the interruptions that always come. That is why a promise sized for a perfect day so often fails on a normal one.
The loop
- Trigger: You feel behind.
- Thought: "I need to catch up on everything today."
- What you do: You make an oversized promise.
- What happens: It looks too big to start, so you put it off.
- Then it starts again.
The shift
Promise one thing you could finish in 20 minutes.
Try this
Run the "keep it small" experiment for a week and see what your own record says.
See experimentsSource
Students finished their theses later than predicted, on average later than their own worst-case estimates.
Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the "planning fallacy": Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366–381.
A general finding about how people tend to work — not advice for your situation, and not a diagnosis.