This is Steva Robbins.

Welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

As longtime listeners know, I sometimes run super productivity days called Do It Days.

You can learn about them at do it days.com, and there's a link in this episode's transcript.

Participants check in hourly to share what they're doing, and we get a behind-the-scenes look at the wild, wild life of authors working on books, grad students absolutely slicing up brains to do research and, right, and ministers preparing a Sunday sermon. Every do-a-day, someone always says, in the next hour, I plan to write six pages of my novel.

My heart sinks.

Six pages in one hour, I could never do that.

I'm a pathetic, miserable failure.

But then at the next hourly check-in,

the once-hopful author calls in, full of despair.

I only got through a page and a half.

I say sympathetic words.

Inside, however, it's joy, happiness,

schadenfreude. Who's the pathetic, miserable failure now, eh? And then I realized that when

writing my book, I averaged at most one page per hour max, so their failure is better than my

crowning achievement. Great. Now I suck again. Actually, I don't suck, and neither does my author

friend. What sucks is human nature, specifically the planning fallacy. That's a fancy word that

means that everyone underestimates how long it takes to do something. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman

has proven it, and it took a lot more work to run the experience than

he thought it would.

When we underestimate, we don't schedule enough time to complete a task, and we schedule

too many competing commitments.

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