Here are three practical ways that help take the guesswork out of planning your workload: Even when we try to estimate for the worst case scenario, we still overestimate our capabilities about 70% of the time.
#REDDIT UNREALISTIC OPTIMISM HOW TO#
How To Counteract Your Planning BiasesĪ general awareness of your cognitive biases isn’t enough to prevent them from influencing your productivity. Your desire to exceed expectations and help your company succeed can be counterproductive. As you take on more work than you can handle, you will eventually miss deadlines, let your team down and feel discouraged. But when someone is in a bad accident, we don’t think the same will happen to us. When we hear that someone wins the lottery, our brains are wired to think that we can win, too. Recent studies involving brain scanning found that our neurons encode desirable information that enhances optimism but fail at incorporating negative information. Knowledge of death forced our brains to develop a tendency for irrational optimism for the sake of survival.
Without it, our awareness of mortality would have hindered the daily activities needed for survival. Scientists believe there’s an evolutionary explanation for our optimism. While optimism is usually seen as a positive attribute, in the case of planning your workload, it can cloud your judgment. The science behind this thought process is called optimism bias, which causes us to believe that we are at a lesser risk of experiencing obstacles during our project. We are blind to what might go wrong, even when we have prior experience of unexpected problems and distractions. We’re confident in our abilities and expect a successful result. One of the reasons we unknowingly fall into this trap is that we like to assume the best-case scenario. Your burning desire to be productive and succeed are causing you to fail. We lose focus, and our productivity suffers. This leaves us feeling optimistic early on, but as time goes by, the impending deadlines cause panic. The planning fallacy often causes us to agree to an unrealistic workload with unrealistic deadlines.
The average actual completion time was 55.5 days, with only about 30% of the students completing their thesis in the predicted time frame.
The students also estimated 27.4 days if everything went as well as it possibly could, and 48.6 days if everything went poorly. In their famous 1994 study, they asked university students to estimate how long it would take to finish their theses. The idea was first proposed in a 1979 paper by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. It’s called the planning fallacy, a subconscious phenomenon that everyone is susceptible to. We all have a bias in our thinking that makes us underestimate how long projects will take even after we’ve completed similar tasks. Human beings are consistently bad at estimating how long it will take to complete tasks. Why We’re Incapable of Predicting Our Productivity However noble our intentions are to take on more work, our inability to accurately predict our productivity sometimes leaves us scrambling.īy understanding the science behind why we overestimate our capabilities, we can develop a smarter approach that counteracts our planning biases to create manageable workloads and get more done. We all have a tendency to overestimate our capabilities, while at the same time we underestimate how long it will take to complete a task. It’s late Friday, and your to-do list has four items that are all due within the next hour. When you planned out your week, the workload seemed realistic, but in the end you somehow over-promised and under-delivered.
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