Know Thyself

I just finished reading the book Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nickolas Epley. 

He suggests we conduct a simple experiment on ourselves.  He wants us to think of an important task we want to complete in the next few weeks.

Then write down on a piece of scratch paper our most accurate prediction of when (date and time) we are going to complete this task. 

Then write the best-case scenario if everything goes as quickly as possible.

Finally, estimate the worst-case scenario, if everything goes as badly as it possibly could.

Then he bets us that we will not make our worst-case scenario.

One case Epley describes is students working on their honours thesis.  The students’ predictions were on average 27 days in the best-case, 34 days in the realistic case and 49 in the worst-case.

The actual average turned out to be 55 days.

In another experiment, only 45% of the projects were done by the time they were predicted, with 99% certainty, to be completed.

Epley believes that the most interesting thing about the planning fallacy is that “despite having so much experience committing it ourselves, we so consistently think that our own mistakes are things of the past rather than the present.”