Everything takes longer than you think
The problem isn’t that you’re not working fast enough. It’s that your expectations were never realistic to begin with.
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I originally published a version of this essay in October 2019, and have updated/expanded the post. If you find it helpful, please share with friends. Enjoy.
Read time: 5 minutes
The problem isn’t that you’re not working fast enough. It’s that your expectations were never realistic to begin with.
For example, I was on the phone with my bank recently. I thought it would take 10 or 15 minutes... It took 51 minutes.
Almost an hour.
Whether you are troubleshooting a technical issue, hiring to grow your team, or running an errand…
Everything takes longer than you think.
Why does this matter? Because every day, we have to estimate how long things will take.
If you get better at estimating timing, you’ll be less stressed in all areas of life.
If you’re doing something for the first time, give yourself more time to figure it out.
Things will inevitably pop up. And by “things,” I mean anything and everything you could imagine to go wrong.
A few years ago, I was setting up an email automation using Zapier to connect two apps. I thought, “This is going to be easy. I have the documentation so it should take 30 minutes to do.”
It ended up taking 7 hours over two days.
I realized the documentation didn’t cover the use case I needed when I was fifteen minutes in. From there, it took multiple rounds of Google search, using live chat, and waiting for email responses from customer support before it finally worked.
Most of the stress could have been avoided if I reminded myself that things take longer than you think, especially when you’re doing something new.
Another example from last week:
I was using ChatGPT to combine spreadsheets where I had partial data in different CSV files. I thought, “I can use a user’s email as a unique identifier to combine the information across these spreadsheets.”
I tested my hypothesis on two initial spreadsheets, and the resulting downloadable file was nearly instantaneous and exactly what I wanted.
I was thrilled. I thought, “This should like 20 minutes total across all my data.”
It ended up taking 2-3 hours spread over a week.
As I started applying this process to my larger data set, I realized certain spreadsheets were missing certain pieces of information, that ChatGPT would get confused if I didn’t format the column headers to match across spreadsheets, etc. I ended up wanting to update my requirements partway through, which meant I needed to take a step back and redo certain parts.
Now, without AI, it would have taken much, much longer. I would have had to hire a freelancer to do it manually, or would not have done it at all.
This was my first time using ChatGPT to manipulate data like this, and I learned a bunch along the way, including breaking my task into smaller steps, the importance of cleaning the data a bit on my end, etc.
These kinds of starts and stops are extremely normal when you are learning by doing. It will be faster next time.
So it was still a win. But my original estimate that it would take 20 minutes was wrong.
Time and time again, I am reminded: Everything takes longer than you think.
This is why, if you’re doing something new, you should:
Build in buffers.
Build in time to get into flow.
Build in time to think.
Build in time to discover unknown unknowns.
Build in time to learn.
Build in time to recuperate.
Build in time to troubleshoot.
Of course, this doesn’t only apply to tasks immediately in front of you.
Higher level, macro goals take longer than you think, too. What you think might take weeks could take months. What you think might take months sometimes takes years. What you think might take years, could take decades.
This isn’t meant to be discouraging. Quite the opposite.
When you adjust your expectations about how long things take, you can make more realistic plans and stop beating yourself up for being “too slow.” You’ll be less frustrated, and can enjoy yourself more along the way.
Is there an area where you might want to admit that things take longer than you think? How might that be useful for setting expectations internally and for the work itself?
Hit reply because I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next Wednesday at 8am ET.
Wes
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Daniel Kahneman breaks down why this happens and how to respond in Thinking Fast and Slow (chapter 23). We are all prone to "The Planning Fallacy" and this is because we lack "The Outside View."
He writes: "The treatment for the planning fallacy has now acquired a technical name, REFERENCE CLASS FORECASTING" and "the renowned Danish planning expert Bent Flyvbjerg... has applied it to transportation projects in several countries."
The process has 3 steps which boils down to getting data on a representative group and setting a baseline, and then evaluating how well your case compares to the baseline so you can adjust.
At a personal management and project management level, we will always have practical difficulty dedicating any time to gathering baseline data if we don't already have it. I've found that, to your point Wes, we are best off taking our initial assumption and padding it with a substantial contingency that grows with the uncertainty and complexity of the task.
I love the reminder about the frustration factor. Generally when approaching something new we are optimistic and naive. We can’t help but be these things so remembering and maybe simply multiplying the estimate by 3 can help with the “less positive” self talk that follows. Thanks!