What kind of difficult?

Projects can be daunting for so many different reasons.  I find that a great way to confront the daunt, is to identify in excruciating specificity what is hard about the project.

Often it is the objective that requires clarification. Other times, there surfaces some hand-wavy element of the plan that needs fleshing out.

Sometimes it becomes clear that the project is not hard, its just hard for me! I find it wonderfully invigorating when the most effective thing to do is to stop, learn X, then proceed. (Thank you O'Reilly publishing!) New skills can also be hired, particularly when there is clarity on exactly what is needed!

Perhaps the most exciting is the opposite case, when the crux of the problem is truly novel and has to await delivery of an innovation from the R&D laboratory that is the subconscious. Oh, yes, you have to work on the problem, but it's almost always the background processing that finds the solution, no?

The deconstruction of project difficulty is also a great step towards better estimates of time to completion, placing the project even more solidly on a well-managed path to satisfying completion.

So, what kind of difficult are you up against right now?

Delusion Time!

Cost estimation is a crucial input to the management of commitments to self and others that underlies achievement and quality of life.

Unfortunately, I do a very poor job of estimating how long projects will take. In the past three weeks, I have spent 75 hours on a project that I estimated would take 10. "5 minute" emails take me more like 20. 

My estimates are not just imprecise, they are systematically biased. Downward. I almost always underestimate the time required. 

What is truly astonishing is the persistence of the bias. I've been planning based on best-case scenarios for, um, 37 years, and yet in this moment, this blog post is taking longer to finish than I had expected. Just like the last three did. 

At one point in my current project, I made a list of several sub-tasks, with estimated times for each. The first sub-task ended up taking 6 times longer than I had estimated. So I updated my estimates for the other sub-tasks...by a factor of two. How can I so consciously distort my own estimation?!

I think I am just loathe to admit that there is not time enough to do everything that I want to do. As I think about it, if I were to even add up my oh-so-rosy estimates of the time required to fulfill all my current commitments to myself and others for the coming week alone, I fear that I would have a rude awakening. 

Admitting to unbiased time estimates would force me to face painful trade-offs head-on. I would have to re-evaluate my pie-in-the-sky project list and renegotiate commitments with myself and others. People might be disappointed. I might be disappointed.

But failing to face the trade-offs upfront doesn't just kick the can down the road, it basically kicks it out into a busy intersection where life becomes a cycle of deadline-crises and "passable" output. Even between crises, over-commitment saps mental energy and emotional resources, undermining enjoyment and engagement.

This is an amazing planet. There is no end of fantastic pursuits and projects. Not only do I currently have more wonderful projects and hobbies and commitments than I can manage, but I can think of dozens more that I would love to take up! But the satisfaction of realized vision, of excellence, and the exhilaration of effective engagement are worth learning to focus on a limited, feasible set of projects.  

Have a fantastic week! Enjoy the planet! Just not everything at once.