Abstract
People underestimate their own task completion times by focusing on plan-based scenarios and discounting past overruns — the classic planning-fallacy experiments (Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994).
Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366–381. DOI
Key findings
- Own vs other: — Predictors are too optimistic for their own tasks; observers do not show the same bias.
- Scenario focus: — Think-alouds show future plan narratives crowd out distributional past experience.
Application
When you fill a desired-time cell and skip the real-time cell — open this cite for why the fantasy clock wins without a forced second column.