Optimism Is A Beautiful Thing Until…
Optimism is a beautiful thing! It's great to approach life and work with positivity and a can-do spirit. Surely that'll get us farther than the opposite mindset will.
But here's our challenge: We humans are overly optimistic when estimating the time it will take for us to complete a task and thus how many tasks we can accomplish in a given time. We humans are bad at this. Really bad.
This snafu in our decision-making is known as the Planning Fallacy, identified by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
They showed that, both individually and collectively, we tend to underestimate how long a task will take. Because of this, we make unreasonable plans and seriously overcommit how much we can deliver and how fast we can deliver it. It's a thing.
This Planning Fallacy is another reason we struggle with time issues. We, or in some cases others responsible for committing our time, make unreasonable plans based on superhuman timelines we can't meet. Working in that reality is miserable with its stress, overwhelm, and neglect of other priorities.
If we want relief, we can use different techniques to improve our planning accuracy. Some researchers suggest we consider our history performing similar tasks and plan based on past experiences. Other researchers suggest that we break our complex tasks down into component parts to better estimate the overall time needed. Still others suggest we can't be trusted to consider our history and so should make an estimate and then double the time planned!
I'm trying these techniques in a hybrid approach. I've had some successes, which felt good, and some big misses -- like not accounting for interruptions and a run-over meeting earlier today.
Tomorrow I'll start fresh and try to learn from all this.
Ultimately, remember that the point of all this is to have enough spaciousness to do all the work of Loving Leadership, our administrative, strategic, operations, technical, learning, AND yes, our human work too!
