Why Everything Takes Longer Than You Expect
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- Опубліковано 18 січ 2017
- The Planning Fallacy Explained.
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Anyone else watching this instead of doing homework you planned on doing?
s
Yup, i got 3 papers due next week but here i am .. watching youtube
essay due tonight and its 11:15
:0
Joshua Zito
East coast!
yep
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Took me 4 hours to watch this.
:)
I've got another 4 hours on you. I've had the tab open all day and only just watched it. It took me 8 hours to watch this.
Ok, this is really funny :)
I've heard of all of these things before, but you did a great job of presenting them in a fresh way.
P.S. Hello random person scrolling through the comment section, have a nice day.
Pro tip, keep the information in those papers to a bare minimum, finish the paper. if there is time to expand on it, do it. An OK paper is better that nothing.
I find it ironic that this video had to be re-uploaded, thus taking longer to completely finish than was expected!
My problem is not estimating time incorrectly when planning. I just don't plan at all.
well that's not necessarily bad. Because I know that I will never have enough time to study for my exams; I don't plan for them and thus I don't lose time with the planing itself.
Guilty as charged! I'm not a procrastinator, just a chronic under-estimator (especially with editing my videos). My wife watched this with me and, as I covered my face with both hands in shame, she also put a hand on my face. It was so relatable, it was /literally/ a triple face-palm. I need to try that estimating-for-someone-else trick.
as a truck driver I can say for certain that I always overestimate the time needed to get some where. it's better to be early than late.
What I sometimes do is a predict how long something will take me, then predict how long that thing will take my friends, and then I just take the average of that. It has worked pretty accurately for me! Not perfect of course, but at least closer to it...
This is why I don't plan time to do things at all. If something comes up, I do it right then and there. School assignment due in 2 weeks? Done the same day I get it. Y'know what they say: you snooze you lose.
*thinks of every single grand designs episode ever*
Annika Victoria HAHAHA SO TRUE
Fixing the audio took longer than you expected, didn't it?
Lol. This is my second time commenting on this vid but I really enjoyed it! Interesting perspective!
This is so helpful. Love your channel!!! ⏰💞👏🏼
Remarkable video, miss Hill. The mix between you sitting in the table, standing in the backyard, and walking places really adds to the entertaining-while-learning thing. Interesting topic and wonderful editing. My very sincere congratulations on this one.
This video was soo helpful in highlighting my flaws that i procrastinate most of the time and the solution to this is to learn from my past experience to plan for the future. Thanks Vanessa :)
so much love for this channel
What about the reverse?
I have Asperger and acute anxiety syndrome, until I began seeing a doctor a few years ago I avoided doing chores because I felt they'd require a nearly insurmountable amount of effort. I live alone so you can imagine what my apartment looked like. It was worst on days where I had an appointment later, I felt it was not worth starting to do nearly anything because I feared not being finished by the time of my appointment.
The only thing that was not affected is reading books, there the planning fallacy showed its nose: Just one more chapter...
I think that's just the circular nature of procrastination, or what I prefer to call avoidance strategies. Anything you delay will seem bigger and bigger until you finally address it.
I recently found out about your channel and it is so interesting. Also you seem like a very nice and happy person that is full of positivity. Keep up the great work!
Greetings from Poland :)
Wonderful video.
I started time-boxing about a month ago, and am starting to overestimate the amount of time it takes to complete tasks, instead of underestimating.
You definitely deserve more subscribers
Superb, excellent. You are also doing much better about not lifting your shoulders. You have my compliments.
great topic! hits home.
This was a very interesting video. Thanks for sharing.
NEAT, i've been wondering if this was an actual phenomenon, or if i just suck. i don't think i've EVER completed something in a time frame i figured it would take :o
I'm going to Sydney in 1 week :) looking forward to see you there!
Thank for another notification when I am trying to complete a paper
what great info, it's science, not that we suck at planning, as much as we want to beat ourselves up about it
Brilliant.
Thank you so much for making these videos. Love from India. 😊😊🙏🙏
I love deadlines. I love the noise they make as they woosh by.
(Douglas Adams)
I think this also ties up a bit with procrastination.
You under estimate the time it takes +
you wait until the last minute =
Disaster.
midterms tommorrow, thanks to this video, im motivated to start studying now C:
This is quite an interesting subject!
It made me think of the speedrunning gaming community. Fascinating to see how frequently many of the participants at the Games Done Quick events get under the estimates given. Makes me wonder how they arrive at those times and just how many past runs' data went into arriving at them. It makes sense that it's super important in those events, since it's important to stay on schedule.
(I guess planning fallacy is something beginner speedrunners may fall for more often than more experienced ones... at least in regard to speedrunning. They all might still fall for it in other arenas.)
This is kind of interesting from a software development perspective since newer processes were designed with this in mind (as well as concerns with plans being too rigid). Agile processes figure out the minimum amount necessary to release software, even if that doesn't include significant features, and then if a release estimate is required, it should be for the full version (or at least something more than the minimum viable product).
Excess optimism is a powerful motivating factor in any project!
Great Video. So it is not just me with time management problems ... now I need to go do my dishes ... but I still have time , so in a bit :)
Love that you've included Hofstadter's Law
im an aircraft mechanic and it is true that when we plan a job it takes more time than expected. but the program where we log everything takes into account past jobs and how it took for different maintainers to do. and it has a different estimated tine for all kunds of jobs.
You're the best Vanessa
whaaaaat, your back in Sydney!!?!??! DAMN.. should've gone to the opera house...at least this time it would've been interesting.
very good and effective as possible it can
I experience the opposite. Tasks that need to be done are done actually faster than expected, the problem is to start working on them. I delay the start until the very last possible moment, just to find out that I finished faster than expected.
Can you please tell me where you got that vase from. It's the most badass vase ever!
Amazing video, thanks for the entertainment! Can you do a video on Murphey's law?
+tlittlebo that would be amazing!
I find I underestimate for two reasons - firstly, when I list down all the tasks required I unintentionally omit one or more tasks, and secondly, I have too high an opinion of my own abilities. For the former, I find that if I list tasks down to finer level of detail I always get a larger estimate. For the latter, estimating how long someone else will take to do the task would probably be a good strategy.
I have seen this happen to a lot of people. However, in personal experience, I find things tend to be quicker than I expect. For example, if someone tells me it will take an hour to get somewhere, I general add an additional half an hour, depending on the person, and I find that time is far more accurate. Perhaps a little over estimated, but more accurate than the original expected time frame. But I am also quite OCD about time management, and make sure all my predictions are "Wild Over Estimations".
I already saw this. Just passing to drop a like.
I enjoy your videos far too much
Yep i've been wondering that, especially my sleeping, always take longer than 10 hours a day
My classmates and I found that scaling a time estimate by pi usually produced a fairly accurate prediction of the actual time an assignment or marking session would take.
I completely relate
city councilors in my city Toronto should be taught this.
Every project takes longer than expected and costs more at the end. Like clockwork.
Don't promise a date and if you have to add 20 - 50% of time. Also add 50% to the 'estimated' cost already.
Let's live in the real world.
Ah scope creep. Every coder's faithful companion. But there are other issues involved, especially when the planning is being done by people in different fields. When a manager and/or client describe the functionality that they're looking for they can often overlook things that they thought were implied and/or simple to do for things which would actually take huge amounts of more time and work. That's why the companies who can afford it hire people who's job is nothing other than interpreting jargon and finding those potential issues.
There also can be an issue in any scheduling/planning instance where people mistake how long something will take with how simple it will be to do. For instance, when I worked in indie games it took waaay less time to code the game mechanics and 3D physics calculations than it did to edit the physics and/or animation variables so that their movement across the terrain matched the movements in the animations. The math was definitely harder to figure out, but neither myself nor my boss had realized that the length of such tasks (and their dependency on the completion of certain tasks from the art team) really should have been more thoroughly discussed in the planning stage.
BER Berlin Airport
Planned Opening: October 2011
Real Opening: Later than 2017.
Costs planned: 2 Billion €
Current price: 5 Billion €
I've got some beautiful memories in Sydney... too bad I work and live in Italy, otherwise I'd go there at least twice a year just to chill around.
I don't notice myself falling into the planning fallacy. I do however notice the opposite in myself annoyingly often. I feel like tasks will take so much time to complete that I put them off schedule. When in reality it would've taken me not much time. Factoring out the time I spend getting distracted.
How long a software project will take: 1 -- make your most conservative estimate; 2 -- double it; 3 change to the next higher commonly used time unit (so an hour becomes two days, a day becomes two weeks, and a week becomes two months).
When you take a big task, you split it for smaller parts and estimate time to complete each part adding extra hours according to this fallacy and, maybe, few extra for unexpected problems. So, in the end, that vision scares you so much than you give up on very beginning and never even start work.
its crazy, i expect to get done in 20 minutes, but then it takes an hour
Evans Law states that we estimate the time it will take to do a adequate job and does not take into account striving for excellence.
Well I've majored in the 400 Word Essay in under 2 Hours...
Trump-speak doesn't count; anyone can write thousands of words quickly if they're talking out of their ass :P
IceMetalPunk Why do you bring Trump into this. I don't support him but it seems unnecessary.
Because "Trump-speak" is much more concise way of saying "babbling on just to speak even though you don't really know what you're talking about", and I'm a fan of being concise. And it's not just me saying that; there's a rather well-known meme about how Trump's speeches are like a kid trying to fill out an essay they don't understand. So I just referenced that meme.
And now, with all this explanation, the conciseness is gone, so...thanks for that?
IceMetalPunk It was unnecessary you could've just said "It doesn't count if you're just talking out of your ass" but nope you had to reference a very poorly known meme and make fun of our next president.
And the reason you're getting so upset about this is...why?
Whenever I have a meeting somewhere I always try to estimate how long it will take me to get to the place I'm suppose to go, and I either get there 30 minutes earlier or run out of time and are late. Does this also falls into this kind of problem?
i'm experiencing this right now with these two projects i was contracted to do lol. i underestimated the time it would take big time. so baffling -.-a
When I saw the planning, I thought "oh, Prudentials is going to be a sponsor of this video AGAIN!!!"
It's always the same when you see a TV show with people building a house or renovating it - the time they estimate is always way to short and it's always way more expensive. The only exception I saw was a very meticulous enginer who got it just right.
Where can I meet you ? (for research purpose)
awn, you talked about this with Hank in an interview you did
Will you be coming to VidCon Melbourne?? Please
Good estimation comes with experience.
story of my life told in under 5 minutes...
I always underestimate, regardless of how much extra time I add. Count me in as a new subscriber!
Your eyebrows are on point
4:06 how do you edit a clip saying you finished editing a the video
Obviously she went to a different time zone, duh
she only had to add the one thing she was currently recording. At this point the video is pretty much done editing :-)
The city that takes on projects from companies should always multiply the time estimated by 1.3-1.5. I never understood it. As a construction worker were supposed to be on time but its all good when the company has literally never been on time lol
Finished editing - in a reasonable amount of time.... You just took a spontaneous trip to Sydney in the coffee break ;)
Wow, I haven't watched this channel since the 'New Years Resolution' video. Gonna watch some more soon. Is it just me or did your voice become slightly deeper in 3 years? o_o
I'm guessing that's a reference to this video?
ua-cam.com/video/zcE_6M1YuK8/v-deo.html
So was this uploaded twice?
I planned on taking 4:53 to watch this video. It took me 8 hours. That's right, I started planning to watch this video before it came out!
I've experienced something like Hofstadter's law but with the goal of catching up a thought to the current moment, or counting up the the current moment, which never works because moment over before the thought's done processing... just restless brain things...
Thought enrolling for uni takes like 20 minutes but 2 days later I'm still not done
Where was this video 4 days ago...
10 points to Gryffindor for the mini wolverine bobble head at 0:35
Hofstadler's law has the same conception of infinity as the paradox of Achilles racing against a turtle
I wonder if people didn't look at a clock or keep track of time would they be able to complete their task quicker? Since they have no idea how close they are to their estimate or how much time is left
You're actually right. During school tests I warn students to don't pay any attention to the clock in front of them. Monitoring the time ironically wastes time, as well as causes unnecessary stress.
when i plan something and then doit it takes (almost) always less time than what i planed.
"Or a book is checked out." Knowing what that actually means makes me feel old... :D
well libraries still exist...
I planned to finish reading the Art of Thinking Clearly by Dobelli in a week. But it took me two months due to inaccurate estimate of time. I take on too much.
I feel like a lot of government contracts rely on sunk cost fallacy once it's finally underway.
tl;dr: Software has it even worse, I consider software size estimation a waste.
When doing software, if well engineered, you design for reuse. In consequence for future projects there is a chance you can reuse old code, either your own or third party.
If you are doing that, then most of the times goes to tasks in which you don't have experience (because if you had, then you had code to reuse[1]). In consequence the value using historical data to estimate is diminished.
[1]: Code to reuse may exist from third parties, but you may not be able to license it, or you may not be aware of it... because you haven't searched for it because you had not face that particular problem before.
---
If you look at the different estimation strategies out there, you'll see that they all fail in one of these:
- Compare it to a similar project. If you had actually done a similar project, you should be able to reuse that. It may be the case that you hadn't done a similar project... but you think you did, and then the estimate is wrong. You could try using third party historical data... if you can find somebody who publishes it... and then you have to worry about the differences in skills and resources of those who made it (and let me remind you that synergy is not guaranteed, more people doesn't imply faster).
- Break it into small tasks, estimate the parts. Again, you should be able to reuse... so the trouble is in estimating the part with which you don't have experience, and since you don't have experience... you may not know what the tasks are, or how long they will take.
- Don't estimate. Instead lie to get the client. There may exist a method to the lies (such as lowering the estimate to get the client, or just going with the first number that comes to your head [2]), but that doesn't make it a real estimate.
- Fancy methods. These come with a formula, look scientific, and boil down to some combination of the above with arbitrary adjustments for the tools, team size, and even estimation errors. Those that work often work because the adjustment for the error in estimation improves over high quantity of estimations, which is an strategy that could be applied to any method including the lies one.
- Hire an expert. Well, the expert got to use some of the other strategies, so how does that work? Edit: it gives you somebody to blame and removes your personal bias.
[2]: We are predictably irrational, but not random. That first number that comes to your head is not random. Call it intuition, gut feeling, or a subconscious process that learns from experience... perhaps our brain does better than our paper methods, but that won't fly in the face of a process certification for your company.
---
Edit: and the estimate is susceptible to anchoring. Tell the engineer that you think the project may take x amount of time, and then the results you get tend to that amount of time.
Recommended: Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It
I underestimated the amount of time it takes to get everything in check for uni. Assumed 5 hours, now it's day 2 and no end in sight ;;
Spelling! Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
So now I finally got an excuse! I always double the amount of time I think I'll need but sometimes I need even more. Now I can blame Hofstadler.
By the way, on one hand you say that according to Hofstadler's law things always take longer than expected (even if you take that law into account) but then you say that looking at past experiences of yourself DOES work.
Isn't that contradictory?
I'm a bit of a pessimist, so I figure it will take me another 3 to 4 times longer than the expected time taking the planning fallacies into account; I am very often right...
What's the term for when your inexperience causes you to underestimate the length/difficulty of a task? Is that just the planning fallacy as well?
Beginner's fallacy?
that's called ignorance or simply making assumptions
lol yeah but theres an actual specific term like this for it
noxabellus how would you know if you don't know the term? you're also asking somebody else whether that's considered the planning fallacy.
because I've heard people refer to what I'm talking about with a specific term, I just can't remember it.
"The Brain Craft paradox"
You say you have finished editing the video, but you have to edit the video to add the part where you say that.
Doesn't seem to matter how I estimate. I struggle with Murphy's Law.
(I can listen to Nessy talk all day)
sound back in sync :D
I know Predential paid for an ad but what was said is misleading as there are studies that show you don't need as much money over time when you retire
I wish I had weeks to watch all these videos on loop again and again
edit : It may takes months