Why your 30-minute task takes two hours (and how to plan around it)

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Write the article. Forty-five minutes, tops.”

Two and a half hours later, you have half an article and a plan that’s been wrong since 9:15. If this happened once, you’d call it bad luck. But it happens every week, to nearly everyone, and it has a name: the planning fallacy. People underestimate how long tasks will take, by half or more, even when they’ve done the same task before and been wrong the same way.¹

Planning-Fallacy on Time Blokker

Why your 30-minute task takes two hours (and how to plan around it)