Summary on Planning Fallacy

            Imagine you are an incoming college student with a full load of classes and that, at the beginning of the semester, you are assigned to do a book analysis that is due at the end of the semester. You see which book is appointed for the assignment and realize it is an easy read. In this case, you tell yourself, "Oh that book doesn't seem so bad, I can finish reading it within a week and have the analysis written that same weekend; no problem!"" However, the unforeseen pile up of assignments from your other classes and social commitments have made it difficult for you to get around to that book analysis. Before you know it, the assignment is due next week and you have not even started the first chapter. You have now been victim to what is known as the "planning fallacy." The planning fallacy is "the tendency to overestimate how much we will be getting done and therefore how much free time we will have"" (Myers, 2013). People today, in a wide range of ages and professions, are guilty of this phenomenon. What we are unaware of, and in return what causes us to make this planning error multiple times, is the fact that we are overly optimistic about our own abilities to complete a task. In a 2011 article in The New York Times, David Brooks talks about this error by writing, "Planning fallacy is failing to think realistically about where you fit in the distribution of people like you. Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future"" (Brooks, 2011). .
             Once we do make an error in predicting the amount of time it will take us to complete a task, we typically fail to learn from our mistakes when a similar task is presented again. For example, if you are assigned another book analysis during your next semester, it is likely that you will not remember the fact that you were overwhelmed with work during the course of the last semester, and that you waited until the last minute to work on the assignment.