Unveiling the Planning Fallacy Spell

On a Sunday moonlit night with the sky full of sparkling stars, I once again stayed up late working on a philosophy paper. My eyelids droop as I am click-clacking on the keyboard with my mind getting wearier with each word typed. Understanding philosophy has never been my forte; I have to read the same paragraph repeatedly to decipher the words spewed on the page. I’ve been able to create papers of this size within this amount of time before, but this is my first time taking a philosophy course. I worry I may have underestimated the complexity of this paper and begin to feel anxious and overwhelmed. Am I going to be able to finish this paper in time? I tell myself that I need to “lock in” and focus. This scenario is not new to me, but I’m perpetually surprised to find myself repeating this pattern over and over again. This is an example of the planning fallacy. 

The planning fallacy is a cognitive bias where I implement biased reasoning. This biased reasoning results in my struggle to meet expectations within a given period due to overestimating my abilities. I’ve been committing the planning fallacy my whole life. I create a daily agenda and write out all my tasks. I usually end up completing about two-thirds of the list and rarely finish everything. I consistently assume I have more time to do everything than in actuality and minimize the complexity of the tasks.

I am an expert planning fallacy committer! I wonder why I commit this fallacy so often. Optimism bias may be the culprit. Overall, humans have a tendency to believe they are likely to experience a positive event or situation more often than they will do so. During an in-class discussion, Dr. Vernon mentioned that students who are very behind in their coursework will discuss with her how they would catch up in an unreasonably short period of time. She shared that the students will regularly say they plan to make up weeks or months of work over spring break. They seem confident that they can achieve this goal. However, not surprisingly, they were not able to achieve their goal. Optimism bias can be used to explain their positive attitude about completing their coursework, and the planning fallacy is used to explain the students’ overestimation of their abilities and underestimation of the complexity of their assignments. I’m hoping not to be hoodwinked by the optimism bias anymore, but this bias was used a lot when thinking about completing the philosophy paper! 

I imagine you are in wonder at my mastery of the planning fallacy and the optimism bias! Well, I do this by using confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when you selectively pick out information that supports your current beliefs and actively disregard information that doesn’t support your current beliefs. For example, relying on the fact that I’ve been able to submit papers in a short period of time even though I’ve procrastinated them down to the bone. Disregarding what will be my malaise and instead having free time in the now.

How do you stop committing the planning fallacy? It’s wise to ask others for help planning. Give them your plan and ask for advice; they might see that it would be difficult to get that amount of work done in that time period. Another solution could be splitting up the work you have into smaller parts instead of trying to do it all at once. For example, if you have a 5-page paper to do and only have 5 days left to do it, try completing 5 pages in the first 4 days and save the last day for reviewing and grammar checking. It’s important that we don’t let these cognitive biases control us; it’s possible to break free of them, but it takes a lot of mental fortitude. I should know because I have been trying to break away from these biases for a long time! I will be successful and learn to plan appropriately - I will achieve my goal.

The seconds tick-tick-tick by, and sweat trickles down my forehead as the clock approaches 11:59 P.M. I’m doing my final revisions on this philosophy paper. I’m praying, “Please let me submit this paper on time. I’ll do anything not to submit this late.” Boom, mission accomplished! Never again will I commit the planning fallacy.... or will I?