Plan Accordingly

    As an undergraduate senior, I am always reminded of how my time at college is quickly coming to an end. However, there is always a huge difference in effect when I hear the amount of days left as opposed to the date, March 14, 2011. And this got me thinking of how different forms of the same answer effect how we perceive time, and how this effect would alter our ability to plan for future events as well as looking back on past events. Everyone has had the feeling of a past event seeming like it was just a few days ago or a future event being so far away. How do we estimate time of future or past events, and how does the answering form affect that estimation?

    In my search to understand this, I found an article by Robyn LeBoeuf and Eldar Shafir, describing a tendency for individuals to generally underestimate the time of uncertain events by unit-based estimation, such as days or years, than by end-based estimations, such as a date. Through as series of experiments, they were able to show indirectly that a pattern of behavior was demonstrated, and this behavior stemmed from a process called anchoring and adjustment. When people generate the day estimate of uncertain dates, they “anchor” around the current time and adjust incrementally by the unit, in this case day. Due to insufficient adjusting, it tends to lead to a general underestimation.
    So what does that mean for the rest of us? This can be translated in to bad planning. When you think a task can be completed in a certain amount of time and falter, this could be one of the reasons why it happened. An example from the article demonstrates this; when asking undergraduates how long it would talk for them to complete a thesis, most said around 34 days, when in actuality it took around 56 days.
    So next time you plan on working on a difficult, long term task, try to give yourself more time than you initially think. And when you decide on a date, also have how many days left until then because that will have a drastic effect on how you work. I saw a similar effect when I was making a timeline for my collaborative project. The breaking down of dates seemed less intimidating then counting the number of weeks and days it would take to complete certain tasks. I only hope is that I did not underestimate the time necessary for those task.

Alexander Nalbandian

LeBoeuf, R. A., & Shafir, E. (2009). Anchoring on the "here" and "now" in time and distance judgments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(1), 81-93.