We all need to make plans for the future, and many of those
plans involve estimating time. If I have
to write a grant proposal before a deadline, I need to make a reasonable
estimate of the amount of time that it will take to complete the proposal in
order to fit it into my schedule. A
manager at a company needs to figure out how long a project will take in order
to allocate the right number of people to ensure it is completed.
One factor that may influence your judgments of the amount
of time a project will take is the amount of time it will take before you start
the project. At times, you may be
planning for a project you are about to start in the next few days. At other times, though, you are budgeting
your time off into the future.
An interesting paper in 2011 by Alf Kanten published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
addressed this question.
One way that you figure out how long a project will take is
to figure out how much work you can get done in each unit of time. Think back to what you did yesterday. Each event can be remembered in some
detail. As a result, each hour feels
like it was relatively long. But, if you
try to think back to a day 6 months ago, it is hard to call up a lot of vivid
details, and so each hour does not feel as packed with events. As a result, hours in the distant past feel
shorter (psychologically) than hours from the recent past.
Kanten found this works in the forward direction too. People were given a line and were asked to place
a mark on the line to indicate their feeling about the perceived length of an
hour. Before making this estimate, the
participants were either induced to think abstractly or to think
concretely. Quite a bit of research by Nira
Liberman, Yaacov Trope and their colleagues suggests that when things are
distant from you in time, then you think about them more abstractly than when
they are near to you. Participants who
were thinking abstractly marked a shorter length for an hour than those who
marked a longer length.
How does this difference in the perception of time affect
judgments about how long a project will take?
In another study, participants judged how long a project
would take. For example, college
students were asked to imagine they had been assigned to read a chapter of a
history book and to write a summary of it.
Others were asked to imagine cleaning their apartment. Some participants had to imagine starting the
project tomorrow, while others were asked to imagine doing it some time the
following year.
People judged that the project would take longer if they had
to do it in the distant future than if they had to do it tomorrow. That is, if each hour feels shorter in the
future, then you can get less work done in each hour, and so it will require
more hours to complete the project.
It is probably good that we are biased to think that
projects will take longer in the future than in the present. When planning, it is generally a good idea to
be overly cautious. After all, it is
worse to leave too little time for a project than to leave too much.
