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Hello everyone, this is Cody Nickol. I am an organizational psychologist, consultant, and coach, and also the author of the blog “Work Grow Thrive”. The purpose of all my content is to provide you with up-to-date personal development insights that will help you reach your potential at work. Today, we will talk about why your planning sometimes just doesn’t work out.
Have you ever planned something and realized it takes way longer than you thought? Well, the thing is, we all get 24 hours a day, and if we want to reach our potential, it’s essential to use our time effectively and schedule our time realistically. So, I’m not a believer in trying to fill your schedule as much as possible, as you might end up with burnout. However, I am all for using your time effectively and planning it realistically. Therefore, I’m excited to talk about this topic today.
The Planning Fallacy
There is a phenomenon called the planning fallacy, which describes one’s tendency to underestimate the time it takes to complete a task and underestimate the associated risks and costs. In fact, some studies cite that less than 40% of projects are completed on time. So, why is this the case? This seems to be something that affects us all.
Well, in 1977, Kahneman and Tversky proposed that inaccuracies and intuitive judgments are systematic rather than random, manifesting bias rather than confusion. So, what does this mean? It means that people systematically have errors in their reasoning due to cognitive biases. So, what is a cognitive bias? It’s really a shortcut that our brain uses to process information. The thing about cognitive biases is that they’re efficient, they help our brain preserve cognitive resources. However, the problem is that they often lead to systematic errors in our thinking, judgments, and predictions about the future.
Cognitive Biases Behind the Planning Fallacy
Now, let’s talk about four cognitive biases that underlie the planning fallacy.
Optimism Bias
The first one is the optimism bias. People have a tendency to have an optimistic view of the future. They overestimate their skills and abilities and tend to underestimate the risks or challenges that could come up. In fact, one study asked people to evaluate how good their driving skills were, and over 80% thought they were better than average. Statistically, that’s impossible. So, with this bias, we tend to think that we can do more than we can actually do and that we can get things done faster than we probably can.
Anchoring Bias
Another bias that underlies the planning fallacy is the anchoring bias. The anchoring bias states that the first piece of information that we receive tends to influence our subsequent judgments and evaluations. For example, if a colleague or a boss tells you that a project is going to take X amount of hours, then no matter what information we encounter after that, we have that first piece of information anchored in our heads. So, we’re overly influenced by the first piece of information we encounter, and we don’t do thorough research or give other sources or information a chance to influence our planning and considerations.
Confirmation Bias
The third cognitive bias is the confirmation bias. Let’s say we’ve made a plan for a project and because we made it, we believe it’s the best plan ever. We tend to look for information that confirms our plan and ignore any information that contradicts it. This is why people tend to read newspapers or magazines that confirm their political beliefs. Once we’ve made a plan, we want to stick with it, and if something comes along that says otherwise, we tend to disregard it.
Representativeness Heuristic
The next bias that underlines the planning fallacy is called the representativeness heuristic. This bias means that an existing mental prototype influences our judgment about future events. This is also why stereotypes exist, as we have a mental prototype about a group of people, and every time we encounter someone from that group, that mental prototype is what comes to mind first, and we judge them based on that.
This can also have an effect on our planning. For example, if we had a similar project in the past, we might think we know how approach the new project, and we base our planning on past experiences. However, it could be a different situation, and there might be things we fail to consider, which could cause us to miss our timelines.
For instance, in my first job, I had a lot to do with employer branding and marketing, and I had to create career pages in a consulting capacity. In my second job, I offered companies career pages, but it was a totally different situation. We had to use different technologies and a different company to help us implement these career pages. To be honest, I misplanned how long the career page would take.
It took a lot longer than any of us had expected. There were a lot of technical difficulties that came up, a lot of problems that we had to deal with, but I think part of the problem was that in my mind, I had a mental prototype and it caused me to misjudge the situation that I was in at the time.
Countering The Planning Fallacy
So, what can we do to counter all of these cognitive biases? Of course, it helps that we’re aware of them, but what are practical things that we can do to help us plan better?
Use Singular and Distributional Information
One thing that we can do is, in our planning, to use both singular and distributional information. Singular information is all the information that comes from the present situation, like what your boss is telling you, all the current information that you have. Analyze it, use it. That’s the singular information, but the distributional information is information that comes from outside the current situation.
For example, you could get a second opinion from someone who’s not involved with the project at all — ask them to take a look at the timelines. Of course, this has to be a qualified person. You can also consider projects that you’ve done in the past that were similar. Try to draw on outside sources to gain a different perspective of the situation. When you combine these two things, then your planning will be more accurate because you can consider more factors than you normally would be able to.
Estimate each Part
Another thing that you can do when planning is to break down the entire project or your goal into small parts, and then plan how long it takes to carry out each individual task. We are generally very bad at estimating how long a big project’s gonna take to finish, but we’re a lot better at estimating how long smaller tasks will take. So if you break it down, estimate each piece, and then add that time together, your time estimation will probably be a lot more accurate.
Set Specific Implementation Intentions
My third piece of advice is to set specific implementation intentions. This means identifying what you have to do to reach your goal and when you want to do it, when you want to carry it out. This is very important. Someone might come to you and say, “Hey, could you take care of this?” and you just think, “Yeah, I’ve got time. I could do it, right?” Just in general, you don’t think about it too much. But then you try to do it later and you realize, “Wow, this is taking a lot more time. If I knew it would’ve taken this long, then I would never have committed.” If we consider ahead of time exactly what we need to do and when we will do it, then we’ll have a much more accurate view of the tasks involved in the project, and we can estimate a lot better how long everything will take.
Summary
To summarize, we often have difficulty planning, miss deadlines, or realize things take a lot longer than we ever thought.
The reason for this is because we all have cognitive biases. We talked about the optimism bias, the anchoring bias, the confirmation bias, and the representativeness heuristic. We also talked about three ways that we can deal with the planning fallacy so that ultimately we can plan better.
The first thing is to consider both singular and distributional information, the information from the inside source and the outside. This will help us consider more factors that will affect our timeline. The second piece of advice is to break down the big task into smaller parts and plan how long it takes to carry out each part. The third piece of advice is to consider what you have to do and when you will carry it out.
If you do these things then your planning will become a lot better, and there will be less stress in the long run. I hope this video was helpful. Please like it and subscribe to my channel. Also, if you’re interested in one-on-one coaching feel free to reach out to me here.
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