Dealing with time optimism and over committing myself

rmjb

Registered
Hi everyone,
Even though I've been practising GTD few a few years now, I still have a personality trait of time optimism. I often underestimate how long something would take and I end up over committing myself. This results in me having to adjust expectations with persons and with myself.

Can you all recommend any materials or books that speak to this? I know it is a common trait for certain personality types, of which I seem to be one.

- rmjb
 

gtdstudente

Registered
Hi everyone,
Even though I've been practising GTD few a few years now, I still have a personality trait of time optimism. I often underestimate how long something would take and I end up over committing myself. This results in me having to adjust expectations with persons and with myself.

Can you all recommend any materials or books that speak to this? I know it is a common trait for certain personality types, of which I seem to be one.

- rmjb
Same here . . . keep your peace and be as accurate as possible . . . double-check before moving-on . . . without any very ugly self-sabotaging 'perfectionism'?
 
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mcogilvie

Registered
Hi everyone,
Even though I've been practising GTD few a few years now, I still have a personality trait of time optimism. I often underestimate how long something would take and I end up over committing myself. This results in me having to adjust expectations with persons and with myself.

Can you all recommend any materials or books that speak to this? I know it is a common trait for certain personality types, of which I seem to be one.

- rmjb

I can recommend one method for time estimation I learned years ago. Estimate three times for the completion of a project: your best guess, the best case (shortest), and the worst case (longest). Then use

(Shortest + 2 x Best guess + Longest)/4

as your estimate for how long it will take. In many cases, the worst case is much longer than the best guess, which builds in a cushion. It also forces you to think about why it could be delayed, which is crucial.

Also, make sure you look at time commitments carefully every weekly review, or more frequently.
 

TesTeq

Registered
I can recommend one method for time estimation I learned years ago. Estimate three times for the completion of a project: your best guess, the best case (shortest), and the worst case (longest). Then use

(Shortest + 2 x Best guess + Longest)/4
@mcogilvie Divide by 4? I wouldn't divide. Dividing makes the result too optimistic. Long time ago I've heard that you should get your best guess, multiply by two (in IT) or 3.14 (in mechanical engineering) and change the time measurement unit. For example: if your best guess for a project is 2 hours, multiply it by two and change hours to days. The result: 4 days. Not very optimistic but often real. :D
 

rmjb

Registered
I can recommend one method for time estimation I learned years ago. Estimate three times for the completion of a project: your best guess, the best case (shortest), and the worst case (longest). Then use

(Shortest + 2 x Best guess + Longest)/4

as your estimate for how long it will take. In many cases, the worst case is much longer than the best guess, which builds in a cushion. It also forces you to think about why it could be delayed, which is crucial.

Also, make sure you look at time commitments carefully every weekly review, or more frequently.
Thanks @mcogilvie! This is similar to something I covered in a project management course, the beta distribution for time estimating from the PERT technique: https://projectmanagementacademy.net/resources/blog/a-three-point-estimating-technique-pert/.

The difference is that the numerator has 6 instead of 4 time estimates, which weights the most likely estimate even more.

When learning these things professionally I don't always realize I can apply them personally.
 

mcogilvie

Registered
@mcogilvie Divide by 4? I wouldn't divide. Dividing makes the result too optimistic. Long time ago I've heard that you should get your best guess, multiply by two (in IT) or 3.14 (in mechanical engineering) and change the time measurement unit. For example: if your best guess for a project is 2 hours, multiply it by two and change hours to days. The result: 4 days. Not very optimistic but often real. :D
Snort. That sounds like the correction that needs to be applied due to the other stuff you already agreed to do. It may take 1 to 4 hours to do, but if you don’t have the time it takes at least a week to make the time.
 
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Oogiem

Registered
I can recommend one method for time estimation I learned years ago. Estimate three times for the completion of a project: your best guess, the best case (shortest), and the worst case (longest). Then use

(Shortest + 2 x Best guess + Longest)/4
My version is
Estimated time = (shortest+(3 * Best Guess)+Longest)/5

Very similar but weights toward the best guess a bit more.
 

mcogilvie

Registered
Thanks @mcogilvie! This is similar to something I covered in a project management course, the beta distribution for time estimating from the PERT technique: https://projectmanagementacademy.net/resources/blog/a-three-point-estimating-technique-pert/.

The difference is that the numerator has 6 instead of 4 time estimates, which weights the most likely estimate even more.

When learning these things professionally I don't always realize I can apply them personally.
Thanks for pointing that connection out. I read the Wikipedia article on PERT distributions after failing to get the desired rule from the general beta distribution. The PERT article makes it clear that the PERT formula is heuristic rather than fundamental: the 1-4-1 weighting is imposed rather than derived. The 1-2-1 weighting will give a larger estimate when the worst case is farther from the best guess than the best case, which is safer. The beta distribution is the right family of distributions to use, but it has two free parameters which control where the mean (average time) and the mode (best guess) are relative to the minimum time and max time.

Sorry TesTeq, no info on the change of time units. I think that’s a relativistic correction where thoughts moving faster than the local sped of light in the brain give off Cherenkov radiation, thereby losing energy. ;)
 

TesTeq

Registered
The 1-2-1 weighting will give a larger estimate when the worst case is farther from the best guess than the best case, which is safer.
@mcogilvie How do you estimate the worst case? "Shortest" is easy – no obstacles. "Best guess" is based on intuition and previous experience. But "Longest"? What obstacles can you honestly exclude? For example: how can you estimate the longest time to write a book about a young wizard living in England? 1 year? 2 years? 10 years? Never? The number of possible obstacles is endless – including magic and You-Know-Who… ;)
 

mcogilvie

Registered
@mcogilvie How do you estimate the worst case? "Shortest" is easy – no obstacles. "Best guess" is based on intuition and previous experience. But "Longest"? What obstacles can you honestly exclude? For example: how can you estimate the longest time to write a book about a young wizard living in England? 1 year? 2 years? 10 years? Never? The number of possible obstacles is endless – including magic and You-Know-Who… ;)
Magic has its own laws and logic, and mathematics works even in worlds where magic works and also in writing about them. If there is no upper bound on the length of the project, I switch from the beta distribution to the gamma distribution. The formula becomes

Average time = most likely time + “project decay time”

where the “project decay time” Is measured from the exponential tail of the probability distribution. How do you estimate that? I don’t know. I’m a scientist, not a mathemagician.
 

gtdstudente

Registered
@mcogilvie Divide by 4? I wouldn't divide. Dividing makes the result too optimistic. Long time ago I've heard that you should get your best guess, multiply by two (in IT) or 3.14 (in mechanical engineering) and change the time measurement unit. For example: if your best guess for a project is 2 hours, multiply it by two and change hours to days. The result: 4 days. Not very optimistic but often real. :D
Easy Peasy . . . love it
 

dtj

Registered
I don't use any sort of explicit time factor in my GTD setup, unless its a due date or something. That's precisely why I use GTD. At a strategic level, I just need to know what needs to be done. It's not until you get to tactical planning of the strategically prioritized tasks that I concern myself with theoretical durations. Because my time guesses are horrible, due to being a software developer, those guesses are dubious. For instance, a bug can take an hour to find, or several weeks if it's not as straightforward as I might surmise. So why waste the time to diligently assess time and fit into any sort of short or long term plan. I can, however, take as reliable, tactical assessments if I have been running in "just one more day and i'll have it" mode for a coupla weeks.
 

Gardener

Registered
I don't normally schedule. My active projects include what I expect to touch in the next couple of weeks. I realize that sounds like scheduling, but I generally think of it as everything that I might be working on in parallel in that couple of weeks, so it's not a prediction of what will get done when, but a list of what I'm working on essentially right now.

However, over-optimism does of course creep in--"I finished X, so of course I can regard myself as working on Y now." And then three weeks later I haven't so much as touched Y, so I throw it back into Someday/Maybe. Maybe that's because X came back to life, or Z popped up and became more urgent than Y, or the whole area that contains X, Y, and Z got de-prioritized because some other area came forward.

When I'm forced to schedule and estimate, such as estimating for a kinda-substantial (more than a couple of hundred hours) programming project at work, I generally go through a highly detailed list of what I think I'll have to do, estimating each item with what I regard as a realistic-pessimistic number. That list will no doubt change a ton, but thinking it through is an exercise that stops me from totally missing entire categories. ("Oh, they don't just need reports, they need exports. Let's ask them...Oh, for God's sake, they thought exports just CAME as spreadsheets with formulas, as if by magic? Let's add 500 hours to investigate interaction with Excel, with a disclaimer in the 'unknowns and risks' section. And they get three exports. Three. Any more, they pay more.")

Then I add a glob of time for the unforeseen. Then I blindly double all the individual times. Then I look at the overall number, and if it doesn't make me say, "That's WAY too much!" I blindly double all the individual times again and increase the amount for the unforeseen by fifty percent.
 

John Forrister

GTD Connect
Staff member
Hi everyone,
Even though I've been practising GTD few a few years now, I still have a personality trait of time optimism. I often underestimate how long something would take and I end up over committing myself. This results in me having to adjust expectations with persons and with myself.

Can you all recommend any materials or books that speak to this? I know it is a common trait for certain personality types, of which I seem to be one.

- rmjb
I'm also a time optimist. A few years ago I heard something that helped. People who are late tend to be optimists, because they think nothing will go wrong or show up unexpectedly. Now I try to question my assumptions: Am I sure that traffic won't be backed up? Am I sure that Google Maps has up-to-the-minute information on the fastest route? Am I sure that the elevator won't stop at other floors before mine? Am I sure that parking is available near the destination? Those kinds of questions invariably lead me to allow more time than my unconsciously optimistic self would allow.
 
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