If a group of people aim to get the same plane, they will arrive at the airport at different times. Some will be early and some will be on time; others will leave it until just before the check-in desk closes.
This doesn't just happen when catching flights, of course. The completion of the new Wembley Stadium was delayed by over a year, from a March 2006 opening date until May 2007 ready for the FA Cup Final. Even the Sydney Opera house was planned for a 1963 opening, but opened 10 years later.
Why is this? Why do things take longer than we want?
In Kate Fox's 'Watching the English', she calls this 'the Planning Fallacy": people underestimate the time it takes to complete a task. Fox suggests it is because we have an emotional bias that leads us to wish for a goal that in practice is unrealistic. We may want to please someone or be under pressure to meet somebody else's deadline. Or we may not take in (or want to take in) all the external factors (like staff holidays or traffic jams) that may delay our plans.
A Google search shows the notion is fairly well-documented. Indeed, there has been a some research on it. Lesswrong blog outlines a few examples, sourced largely from researcher Roger Buehler. Some of Buehler's experiments focus on students, who largely underestimate the time it takes to complete an essay. A group of Japanese students, for example, predicted they would finish their essay ten days before the deadline; in fact they completed their work only one day before it.
This could be a case of students being relatively inexperienced on project work. Indeed Lesswrong blog suggests that experience can help counteract this fallacy as can an attitude of 'realistic pessimism', a cognitive psychology term where pessimistic people are better predictors of completing a task.
Even Robert Burns knew about the Planning Fallacy when he wrote: "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men, gang aft a-gley and lea'e us nought but grief an' pain for promised joy."
Couldnae hae put it better wirselves.
Simon
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