Everything takes longer

Everything takes longer, even when you take that into account. One of the iron-clad rules of the world. Taught to me by my ex.

What happens when all those lessons add up? Episode of Freakanomics Podcast this week takes on the “planning fallacy”, which is a weaker form of the rule I was gifted two decades ago. It says we suffer from an optimism bias, which leads to overestimation of how much we’ll get done and how long it will take. Apparently, this bias has some big upsides. Optimists live longer, are happier, and are generally, just, more optimistic.

So what happens if that optimism bias finally burns off? What if you’ve run through the cycle of over-predicting how well some new project will go so many times, that you no longer believe your own hype? What happens if your own reality distortion field suffers a breach?

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