… these things take time.
Now that I’m an independent consultant, I have to track my hours – and if you work with a lot of collaborators on a lot of projects like I do, it doesn’t do you much good to only track your billable hours for your clients, because you need to know how much time you spend on time tracking, taxes, your research, conference organization, writing, doing the fricking laundry, and so on.
So, when I decided to start being hard on myself with cleaning up messes as-I-go so I won’t get stressed out when they all start to pile up, I didn’t stop time tracking. And I found that some tasks that I thought took half an hour (blogging every day) took something more like an hour, and some that I thought took only ten minutes (going through the latest bills and such) also took half an hour to an hour.
We’re not realistic about time. We can’t be, not just as humans, but as agents: in an uncertain world where we don’t know how much things will cost, planning CANNOT be performed correctly unless we consistently UNDER-estimate the cost or time that plans will take – what’s called an “admissible heuristic” in artificial intelligence planning language. Overestimation leads us to avoid choices that could be the right answers.
So we “need” to lie to ourselves, a little bit, about how hard things are.
But it still sucks when we find out that they are pretty fricking hard.
-the Centaur
P.S. This post, and some of the associated research and image harvesting, I expected to take 5 minutes. It took about fifteen. GO figure. Pictured: the “readings” shelves, back from the days when to get a bunch of papers on something you had to go to the library and photocopy them, or buy a big old book called “Readings in X” and hope it was current enough and comprehensive enough to have the articles you needed – or to attend the conferences themselves and hope you found the gold among all the rocks.
