Sometimes work is terrifying. We’re asked to do something that we know, or at least strongly suspect, won’t work. Maybe we’re asked to do several things, some of which are are simple, but one or two make us uncomfortable. We might even place a hard estimate on a task (“It’ll take six hours!”), but deep down something doesn’t feel right. (“Oh well. I’ll just figure that out later.”)

We spend a lot of time guessing how long our work will take. Psychologists have shown this to be a foolish endeavor. They point to the Planning Fallacy or to Hofstadter’s Law, which both show that we are notoriously bad at estimating complex tasks.

But all our work isn’t complex, so we end up with some pretty reliable estimates and some that are wildly off. Those that are wildly off ruin our otherwise fairly predictable projects.

The tendency here would be to try to get rid of those hard-to-estimate tasks.

Good luck with that.

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