View from the North 40: It's everything but the kitchen sink

Research says one of the most common lies we humans tell ourselves is the one about how long a project will take to complete, which isn’t an explanation so much about why I don’t have a kitchen sink, but rather an explanation about why I’m surprised that I don’t have it up and running by now.

This lapse between intended completion date and actual completion date is so common among humans that it has been studied and given a name: planning fallacy — a bias in our thought processes, first identified by researchers Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1977. It explains why humans tend to underesti...