Hofstadter's Law

Hi,

This week’s email is about a common mistake we make when estimating how long things will take to do, and how we can avoid it.

The information here is from my new article on the topic.

Here are the key practical points you should know:

• Hofstadter's law is the adage that “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law”.

• For example, if you expect a project to take only a few days, and then plan for it to take a week in case you underestimated this timeline, then it might end up taking two weeks instead.

• This happens for various reasons, including the tendency to underestimate the complexity of future work and the likelihood of encountering potential issues.

• Accounting for Hofstadter's Law can help you generate better time estimates, and assess the accuracy of other people's estimates, though keep in mind that this adage is sometimes wrong.

• You can also use various techniques to generate better time estimates, including unpacking large projects into small steps, considering similar past work, visualizing the work process, asking what could go wrong, and talking to external people.

As always, I'm happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar