November is a time in which knowledge workers around the world are buzzing with tasks overload, attempts to foster AI while keeping an eye on mental and physical health under a growing amount of pressure and stress.
That is why there’s no better time to be reminded of one of our brain time-bias that all humans endure and that can help us gain some peace of mind.
Here's the time-bias all human beings endure
We all tend to overestimate how much available time we have this week or this month, meaning our ability to assess short term tasks and events.
In practice, we struggle with precisely assessing how long each short term task will take, how many tasks we can get done today or this week, how many friends we’ll be able to actually meet, how many times we’ll be able to exercise or how many work objectives will be achieved by our team or ourselves.
While this is going on, we have another time bias operating in the background:
We all underestimate how long it will take us to finish long terms objectives, say buy/sell/rent a house or open an investment portfolio or a launch a product or write a book. Meaning we undermine how many goals we can achieve in a single year.
To work around these biases , this is what I recommend
1. Since we overestimate how much free time we’ll have this week, then once you review your work week and acknowledge that at least 50% of your tasks are incomplete, you will gracefully remind yourself that it’s all due to this time-bias-issue-inside-our-mind and with compassion push/defer/postpone tasks to either next week or next month.
Note: you do have to prioritize like a “ninja”.
Deferring tasks can only occur inside a well-managed system
(Take the HIME Your TIME crash course if you haven’t done so already).
2. Since we underestimate how many goals we can achieve in a year, then I recommend my clients to first prepare their annual plan for both professional and personal objectives, and then sit with a blank page and add 30% more items to that list.
This enlarged list then goes into their well organized deferring-tasks-system that allows them to manage and finish tasks in accordance to the right time , place, HIME & more.
NOW Print this slide, add in to your office or home pin board and be reminded daily of what being human means
