You've done this a hundred times.
You look at your to-do list and think, "I can knock this out before lunch." Three tasks. Each one seems straightforward. You start at 9 AM, confident you'll be done by noon.
It's 3 PM and you're still on task two.
What happened? You didn't get lazy. You didn't get distracted (well, maybe a little). The real culprit is something psychologists have studied for decades: the planning fallacy. It's the systematic tendency to underestimate how long tasks will take, even when you have experience doing those exact tasks.
And it's not just you. Everyone does this. Engineers, project managers, students, CEOs. The planning fallacy cuts across every profession and skill level.
