Why You Should Plan To Get Less Done

planning fallacy to describe plans and forecasts that are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases

Hofstadter was half joking, of course. But I’ve always found something a little unsettling about his law, because if it’s true – and it certainly seems to be, in my experience – it suggests something very strange: that the activities we try to plan for somehow actively resist our efforts to make them conform to our plans.

nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself—is that you focus that time and energy more effectively.

it is rarely possible—or even particularly fruitful—to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question in most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half ?

One study found that if people estimated anonymously how long it would take to complete a task they were no longer guilty of the planning fallacy.9 This implies that often we actually know we can’t do things in a given time frame, but we don’t want to admit it to someone.