Plan to Be Behind Schedule

Hofstadter's law of planning states, "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account." Merlin Mann of 43 Folders claims that there's no known reason for why we tend to be overly optimistic about our planning, but notes that the more detailed our visualization of the task is, the less accurate we are.

So how do we get around the fact that we're going to be worse than we think? At a company I used to work for, we had a (semi-serious) acronym we used to follow: LEAST. As in, Lower Expectations And Surpass Them. After estimating where and when a project would end up, we'd always tack on a buffer of at least ten percent to our goals and times. Mann goes even further, suggesting adding 40% to your time-to-completion goals.

(Photo via Elusive.Ness's Flickr Stream)