#117: Intervention for inept time management
Do you massively over-estimate how much you can accomplish in any period of time? Do you struggle to work out how long it's going to take you to complete a particular project? Friend, same. Don't worry, though, because there are some well-recognised psychological reasons for that, and plenty of advice too. There's just one problem: when it comes to projects that are linked to your sense of self-worth, time management is even trickier, and the usual strategies might not cut it. Luckily for you, your imperfect buddy is here to throw you a lifeline.
Here's a helpful article with some tips about how to get better at planning your time.
References:
Buehler, R., Griffin, D., and Ross, M. 1994: 'Exploring the "Planning Fallacy": Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion Times', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67/3: 366-381.
Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. 1977: 'Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective
Procedures', Technical Report PTR-1042-7746, Defense Advanced Research ProjectsAgency - Advanced Decision Technology, Decision Research, Eugene, OR.
Episode transcript:
Do you panic when you hear the words, ‘So, when could you get it done by?’
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Welcome back, friends! I’m sitting here at my desk, wearing a woolly jumper. Looks like summer is over, here in the UK. On the plus side, though, a woolly jumper is probably really good for the acoustics of this podcast. It hasn’t occurred to me to wonder whether anyone listening might ever be bothered by hearing my voice bouncing around, but I hope it hasn’t been too much of a burden. Thankfully there are usually a few cats in here to absorb the sound and improve your podcast-consuming experience, which makes me wonder whether they might count as legitimate business expenses. Maybe I could get a few more. For your benefit, of course.
We’re into September now, which means I have just under 4 months left of my 12 months of research leave. The promised output of this period is a full first draft of the book I’m working on. Am I on track to get this done? People have been asking me this, and to be honest it makes me feel anxious. In one sense, there’s nothing to worry about. I’ve been making decent progress. Getting it all drafted out by the end of the year is completely realistic. Did I sound confident when I said that? Because, I am, but also I’m not. I struggle to estimate how long it will take me to do things. I know lots of you do, too. After talking about this with a coaching client recently, I thought, surely I’ve already done a podcast episode on this topic? There’s been enough episodes now that I don’t trust myself to remember them all. So, I looked back through the archive, and no, I haven’t done anything on how to plan time realistically. So, here I am, addressing that omission. And, as is often the case with these episodes, I’m not talking to you from a position of expertise. My line here is not, ‘Gather round, inept planners, and I will honour you with a glimpse into my far superior skills as I reveal how I get my life to run like clockwork’. I’m definitely a fellow struggler, but one who’s using this episode as an opportunity to dive into the detail here, and work out what on earth is wrong with us that, despite our dazzling smartness, we continue to be absolutely rubbish at working out how much we’re likely to accomplish by the end of the year, or how long it’s going to take us to finish a piece of writing.
Helpfully, there’s some research on this. Back in the 1970s, the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky coined the term ‘planning fallacy’ to refer to our - that means everyone, not just uniquely flawed people, like you - to refer to our tendency to underestimate how long it’s going to take for us to get something done. We do this because we don’t learn from how long it’s taken us (or other people) to do similar things in the past. It might have taken you 7 months to write that last chapter, and 7 months to write the one before, but sure, you can get the next one finished in 3 weeks. Does that sound familiar? What’s going on, apparently, is that instead of taking into account how long you’ve taken to do similar things in the past, you focus instead on the details of the upcoming task. You think things like, well, I’ve already written loads of notes, it’s just a matter of sprucing it all up, there’s no way it’s going to drag on for months. And you’re also way too optimistic, because you work on the assumption that you’re not going to encounter any delays. You base your estimate on the minimum time the task could possibly take. I’ve talked before about my own tendency to do this. The old, ‘I wrote a 4000-word paper in a week back in the nineties, so I’m going to use that as the basis for my current estimate, even though everything I’ve done ever since has taken way longer’.
Now, this sort of timescale-related ineptitude can be a real problem. Realistically estimating how long things are likely to take isn’t just a matter of helping us reach our own personal, private goals - things that matter to us but probably not to anyone else. It can have important implications. If you’re writing a proposal for a grant, your success will depend, in part, on describing a project whose scope is appropriate given the duration of the grant: you want to show you’re going to deliver value for money, but you don’t want to be so over-ambitious that it looks like you have your head in the clouds. Alternatively, if someone asks you to be involved in a project, and you’d like to work with them, then you need to be capable of judging whether you’re going to have the time needed to commit to doing a good job, given what else you’ve got going on. Saying yes but then struggling to do your bit might result in your colleague not wanting to work with you again. And, of course, you know what you’re like: when you get things like this wrong, you don’t merely conclude that you need to work on your time-management skills. Your inner critic goes overboard with spinning it all as evidence for your general unworthiness.
So, what’s the answer? Well, there is an answer - or at least, there are things we can do to improve in this area - but let’s slow down a moment, because when I was reading up about the planning fallacy, one thing that struck me was that the literature on this tells only part of the story. I mean, it does a decent job of explaining why, say, a visit to the supermarket might always end up taking much longer than you expect. But, for most of us, a visit to the supermarket is a fairly neutral task, in the sense that our success (or otherwise) in having it go to plan isn’t going to have far reaching implications for how we feel about ourselves. Being good at supermarket shopping isn’t a central part of our identity, so when we turn out not to be that good at it, it doesn’t call into question our moral worth. But lots of the things we’re trying to get done do have those sorts of implications. If you’re an academic who’s trying to finish writing a paper that you hope to get published, and if you care about succeeding as an academic, then it does matter to you that you’re able to do a decent job here. If it takes longer than you expected, it’s not merely an annoyance, like the supermarket trip. You might end up thinking things like, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out for this’, ‘I’ll never get a job in this field’, ‘I’m struggling with something that other people don’t struggle with’, ‘I’m a failure’, and so on.
Because of all that - when we’re talking about planning tasks whose success has implications for our identity and our self-worth - I think the obstacles to making realistic plans for our time go beyond simply not paying attention to historical data about how long these things take. Let me just run through some of the things that come up in my coaching sessions, which make it hard for people to work out how long they’ll need to get things done.
One big spanner in the works for realistic task planning is the fact that, a lot of the time, it’s not just about making realistic estimates about how long things are going to take. Consider the summer break. You know, that stretch of time that, at the beginning, feels - if not infinite, then certainly long enough to allow you to get a brain-meltingly huge number of things accomplished. Think of the conversations that academics have at the end of it, just before teaching starts up again. Have you ever asked an academic how their summer was, and had them respond by telling you about how they managed to do everything that they planned, plus a load more, and how they just can’t get over their astonishing productivity? If you have, then you need to steer clear of that person in the future, because no good can come of exposing yourself to that sort of toxic energy. (Just kidding. You know I’m just envious.) A far more familiar story is hearing colleagues talk about how of course they didn’t get everything done - but at least they managed a couple of things. Those plans that academics make at the start of the summer aren’t exactly realistic. Often, the people making them aren’t even trying to be realistic. It doesn’t even occur to us, much of the time, to aim for realism. Our summer task lists are more like wish lists, like the letters that kids write to Santa. Sure, go ahead, inhabit a fantasy world in which someone in your life is willing to spend £5000 on Pokemon cards - or to translate that into grown-up, professional, academic terminology, in which the end of teaching brings with it a personality makeover with the result that you work diligently and effortlessly throughout the long, hot days, emerging from your months-long flow state with a significantly longer CV.
Why do we get carried away making unrealistic plans? A few reasons, I think. One is simply that - except in cases like grants applications, where there needs to be some accountability - there’s nobody standing over us, killing our dreams about superhuman productivity, and reminding us to be realistic. We can dream away. And while we’re doing that, we have more important things to do than be realistic. One is salvation. Your default state is to feel like you’re falling further and further behind, which you view as an inexcusable moral failure, and so you console yourself with thoughts like, ‘I’ll redeem myself by finishing this chapter by the end of the month’. You’re not using the language of redemption, obviously, but that’s what you’re doing. You’re having such a hard time struggling with what a disappointment you’re turning out to be, but maybe you can turn things around over the next few weeks or months or whatever. This time next year, if you really knuckle down and focus, you might be a slightly less despicable excuse for a human. The task list you end up making isn’t a dispassionate, realistic estimate of how much you’re likely to get done, even though it might look a bit like one. It’s your pathway to being an acceptable person.
Related to that is our old friend, letting ourselves off the hook. We must be mean to ourselves in order to get things done. Completely false, but very compelling. Lots of people have a hard time revising an over-ambitious task list in order to make it realistic, because that means being less demanding of ourselves, which is a way of being nice to our undeserving selves, which is a way of letting ourselves off the hook, which we must never, ever do. And this really brings out the psychological struggle involved in making realistic plans. I’ve spoken to a lot clients whose plans are more about what they think they ought to get done in the timeframe in question, rather than what they think they realistically can get done. And when you make plans based on what you think you ought to get done, the person you imagine carrying out the plans isn’t really you - it’s an alternative, improved version of yourself. It’s you minus the faffing. You with less scrolling on social media. It’s actually hard not to make those sorts of plans, so don’t be hard on yourself if this resonates with you. Making realistic plans - plans that can be carried out by the actual you, not an improved version - requires acknowledging and accepting yourself, with all your frustrating failures and weaknesses. It’s really hard to say something like, ‘Given how much time I waste, I’d better carve out 2 weeks for this, instead of just 1’. Who wants to do that - to write off and preemptively waste a week that hasn’t even arrived yet? How depressing. Much more comfortable to say, ‘I’ll give myself a week to complete this, and this time I’m going to be super focused and avoid wasting time’.
However. Even when we’re committed to self-acceptance and not keeping ourselves on that godawful hook, even when we’re being sensible about planning, often we’re still trying to do more than simply estimate how long something is going to take. Our plans aren’t just about realism. You’re an ambitious person who likes to challenge themself and occasionally venture outside their comfort zone; that’s why you’ve got to where you are today. And that means that you probably like to use plans to challenge and improve yourself, not merely to estimate how long something is going to take based on how long similar things have taken you in the past. You’ve probably had the unnerving experience of committing to do something for someone, and being asked to pick your own deadline. Like, ‘Write a chapter for this book I’m editing, when do you think you can get it done by? No pressure from me, but it would be helpful to know.’ That sort of thing always fills me with dread. I want to be realistic, but I also don’t want to give up on myself. I don’t want to pick a deadline based on the knowledge that the last thing I wrote was 18 months overdue, so I’d better give this next thing a good 2 years. I want to strive for better this time. And, my wish to do better is not pure fantasy. I know that having a deadline will help motivate me to do the work. Lots of us find more focus when there’s a deadline looming, right? So, when you pick a deadline, it’s not merely an estimate - it’s self-realising, in a way. Choosing the deadline will help ensure that you make it. But it’s really hard to balance being realistic when making a plan, alongside using the plan to help motivate you. This difficulty is exactly why, when I was writing my last book, the final manuscript of which I submitted to the publisher in early 2023, I ended up having files called things like ‘Racing to the end of November 2017.docx’ (yes, that really is the name of one of the files).
So. Let’s take stock of where we are. When you’re trying to work out how long it will take you to complete a project that’s close to your heart and linked to your identity, it’s likely not simply the planning fallacy you’re having to deal with. You’re also probably trying to do too many things with your plan. It might be your redemption fantasy. It might be an account of what you ought to get done, rather than what you are actually likely to get done. It might be a tool designed to motivate you. It might be all of these things, and perhaps more that haven’t occurred to me. It’s no wonder you’re struggling.
If you want to get better at making realistic and achievable plans, what can you do? Let’s start with the recommendations that Kahneman and Tversky came up with in the 1970s, when they first described the planning fallacy. They suggested zooming out from the particular task you’re faced with, and thinking in general terms. Instead of asking how long you think it’s likely to take you to complete this particular task, consider how long this sort of project normally takes, regardless of who’s doing it. Do you have data you can draw on to answer this question? Do you actually know of any similar past projects, and how long they took? If you don’t, that ought to ring an alarm bell. Because if you’re estimating the timescale despite having no data to draw on, then something else must be informing your estimate - and whatever that is, it’s probably giving you the wrong answer. So, one thing you can start doing, to help you get better at this sort of thing, is to make a note of how long it takes you to do stuff. That way, you’ve got something solid on which to base future estimates. You could even go one step further and record how long you thought it was going to take alongside how long it actually took, so you can get some insight into the way you tend to approach planning a project, and perhaps correct for your particular brand of biases in the future.
When I was reading about this advice, I started thinking about my own tendencies. You see, I do have some data on how long certain projects have taken me, much of it etched permanently in my mind. The problem is, I tend to remember the duration only when there was something unusual about it. So, I can remember that I banged out an essay a week for four weeks in the 1990s, as I’m constantly telling you. And I remember that my first book took me years longer than I anticipated. But, if you ask me how long a typical article or chapter takes me, from start to finish, I’m going to shrug. I have no idea. I’d have to dive into my files and emails and check the dates. Similarly, I couldn’t give you any firm answer to questions about how long it typically takes me to put together an episode for this podcast. What I can tell you, though, is that I once threw an episode together - from having the idea to releasing the final recording - in the space of a couple of hours, which was when I was about to head off on holiday and it occurred to me while we were getting ready to leave that I wasn’t going to have access to my recording stuff after we left. (I’m not going to tell you which episode that was.) What all this means is that I have a very skewed idea of how long things take. The only data I have to go on relates to extremes: projects that went unusually fast or ones that dragged out for way too long. So, if I’m forced to estimate a timescale, it’s quite easy for me to write off the very long ones and instead think of those very quick projects. I’ll think, ‘I did it once, I can do it again’. Of course, I have a tendency to ignore the role of luck here - the fact that I was lucky, those times, that I didn’t come up against any obstacles and that the ideas flowed freely. Luck is nice to have, but you can’t bank on it. So, I’ve realised that I should probably do a better job at keeping track of how long the boring things take. You know, the projects that are completely unremarkable and average with regard to how long they take. Paying attention to this sort of thing doesn’t involve any extra work - except for the few seconds it takes to jot down when you started and when you finished - but it gives you an important reference point next time you need to plan something.
Here’s another useful piece of advice, that came out of some research that was done in the 1990s by the psychologists Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross. They found that while, thanks to the planning fallacy, we tend to underestimate how long it’s going to take us to complete some task, we’re much better at estimating how long it’s going to take someone else to do the same thing. We’re better at that because we’re more likely to pay attention to the relevant historical data. And also, while I have no empirical data to back up this hunch, I wonder whether another reason it’s easier to make realistic time estimates for other people is because those estimates aren’t infected by all the stuff I mentioned before: things like the need for redemption, wishful thinking, and playing mind-games with ourselves where we pick a challenging deadline to try to kickstart our motivation. Anyway, the insight that it’s easier to make time estimates for other people gives rise to a couple of strategies you can use to make better estimates for yourself. One is to do your estimate, and then ask yourself if it would seem reasonable if it was someone else who was going to be doing the thing, instead of you. Perhaps that might prompt you to think, ‘Actually, I have no idea why I picked this timescale, let me do a bit of digging and find out how long this usually takes people’. Another strategy is just to get someone else to look at your estimate, or even do the estimate for you. Team up with a colleague when you’re trying to plan realistic goals for the coming weeks or months. I think this highlights an important general point. Very often, we expect to be able to muddle through this stuff on our own. We just need to read one more article on productivity, or download one more goal-tracking app, or listen to one more podcast episode, and then we’ll be able to think clearly about whatever it is that we’re struggling with. And while that might be true (well, I would say that, wouldn’t I?), sometimes a simpler and, frankly, healthier way is just to talk things over with someone else.
I came across a few more sensible-sounding suggestions about how to dial in your estimates about how long things will take, which had to do with the details of things like taking uncertainty into account and thinking in terms of ranges rather than fixed end points for a task. I won’t go into those here, but I’ll put a link in the notes for this episode, and you can explore further if you’re the sort of person who wants to do some nerdy data crunching on all this.
I want to leave you with a couple of general observations that I hope might be useful here. One is that it’s probably going to be useful to you simply to be aware of what it is that you’re trying to do when you come up with an estimate for how long something is going to take you. For that, you can refer back to some of the things I talked about earlier in this episode. Like, are you really just concerned with coming up with a realistic estimate, or are you factoring in things like what you think you ought to be able to achieve in a given timescale, what you imagine other people might expect of you, and what you need to achieve in order to redeem yourself for all the sins you’re sure you’ve already committed? Are you sure you recognise that it’s your imperfect self that’s going to be doing this thing, and not the upgraded v2.0 that you’re hoping will materialise sometime between now and the deadline? Being aware of these things can help you through the muddle. So, for example, let’s say you’re asked to contribute a chapter to an edited book, and you’re asked to specify a date by which you think you could deliver. Take a pause and reflect. Are you worried that your answer is going to be judged in some way? Do you feel any pressure to qualify it - like, by reeling off a list of other stuff you’ve got going on, so that the date you come up with is deemed acceptable? Are you assuming that you need to come up with an estimate right now, on the spot? If so, stop. Committing to an unattainable deadline is probably not the most efficient way to head off merely possible and probably completely imaginary negative judgments from other people. If - as often seems to be the case in situations like this - you’re simply uncomfortable with having no parameters or anchor points, then ask for one. Say something like, ‘What timescales do you have in mind, roughly?’ or ‘What are other contributors aiming for?’ And if you have no idea how to come up with a timescale, take your time and think about it. Ask when you need to give your answer. Give yourself something to work with. There’s enough stress in your life without dumping a completely uninformed, unrealistic, and unnecessary deadline on yourself.
Here’s another suggestion. I’ve already mentioned - based on other people’s advice - that it can be useful to imagine that you’re estimating how long it will take someone else to complete the project you have in mind, because that way you’re more likely to come up with a realistic estimate, based on actual data rather than wishful thinking. There’s another reason why asking, ‘Would this timescale be reasonable for another person?’ is useful, too. If you were setting a deadline for someone you’re managing or mentoring, does the one you’ve come up with strike you as reasonable for a normal person with normal, imperfect levels of productivity? Even if it looks doable, does it also look like the sort of timescale that another person could take on without burning themselves out? Will they have enough time for the other things in their life? Are they going to be able to work on the project in a sustainable way? You know it’s much easier to take these wellbeing related things into account when it’s someone else’s wellbeing than when it’s your own. But - and we both know you need the reminder - it’s important for you, too.
And finally, keep in mind that this is a skill you can develop and improve over time. Stop telling yourself that you’re rubbish at working out how long stuff is going to take - that’s advice for me, as well as you, by the way. Next time you need to estimate how long something is going to take you to complete, or what your goals for the next few months should be, do some research. Go and check how long similar things have taken in the past. Go and look at how much you tend to get done in a similar time period. Give yourself some hard data, instead of planning from a place of clueless guilt and panic.
Take care, imperfectionists.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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