I’m a big fan of the British SF series, Doctor Who. In the show, an alien called The Doctor flies around the universe in a time machine called the TARDIS. While The Doctor has a deep knowledge of temporal mechanics, alas we humans have a very poor understanding of time. In fact, we often underestimate how much time tasks take to do even when we should know better.
In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman discusses the “planning fallacy.” This fallacy occurs when someone routinely underestimates the amount of time it takes to do a task. For example, if on one occasion we got all the lights and made it to work in 20 minutes, a part of our mind now believes we can always make the trip in that time. This is despite the fact we know from our prior experience that it normally takes 30 minutes or more.
The repercussion in our daily lives is the tendency to assume we can get more done in a day than is actually possible. This typically manifests in lengthy to do lists that never get completed. A practical way to combat the planning fallacy is to make our to do lists shorter. In her book, 52 Simple Ways to Get Organized, Claire Tompkins suggests the following:
“The problem with underestimating is that you believe you have more time for those things on your list that aren’t getting done, and then you feel discouraged. Everyone’s daily to do list needs to be a lot shorter.”
She then suggests that we time our regular tasks to determine exactly how long they take. With this knowledge in hand, we can then carefully plan our day and combat the planning fallacy.
The other way to solve the problem is procure your own time machine, but that might be hard if you don’t have a Time Lord for a friend.
Did you make a New Year’s Resolution? While good intentions are plentiful on January 1, it is clear that many people have dropped their resolutions before the month is even a week old. So are New Year’s Resolutions just another pointless tradition or is there a way to make a resolution stick for the year?
The pursuit of efficiency often requires a cleanup of our physical spaces. While clearing out clutter should be easy to do, in practice it is hard to throw away objects we own. For example, maybe you got a mug at a conference six years ago. The conference was unmemorable and the mug is an awful yellow color. As you are considering parting with it, a colleague asks if they can have it. You quickly decline and put it back on the shelf. This is a direct experience of the Endowment Effect.
Remember, a sunk cost is not recoverable, which gives rise to the famous expression, “Chasing good money after bad.” The trick is to evaluate the current status of a project, investment, or commitment in light of where it stands now and ignore past contributions. This way, it is possible to stay nimble and take advantage of better opportunities when they arise.
In this book, Head in the Cloud, author William Poundstone explores the question of whether all this online information is only serving to make us less informed. Online information is easier to skim, but hard to dive into deeply. Poundstone specifically highlights a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect which can lead people to overestimate their own level of knowledge in a subject area.
This is a question of great interest to behavioral economist Dan Ariely. So much so that he did several experiments which aimed to probe deep into how people assign value to the work they do. The results of the experiments were shared in a TED Talk. From the video description:
Illusory Superiority is a cognitive bias whereby individuals overestimate their own qualities and abilities relative to others. It is sometimes called the Lake Wobegon Effect after 
Optimal stopping : when to stop looking
To be clear, this curse has nothing to do with magic or ancient mystical tombs. The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when individuals are unable to ignore the knowledge they have which others do not, or when they are unable to disregard information already processed. This is the reason why an expert musician can make a lousy teacher of novices, because the expert forgets what it is like to know so little.
Efficient Librarian 