Oddly Wired
← all facts
planning

You ignore past evidence when predicting your future speed.

The planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions, regardless of past experience.

Even when people recall that similar tasks took weeks in the past, they persist in predicting days for the next one. The brain prioritizes the 'ideal' scenario over the statistical reality of historical data.

You keep planning for the best-case version of your future self.

Where this comes from

Study
Buehler, Griffin, and Ross, 1994
What the check found
The definition is accurate and correctly attributed to the seminal 1994 paper by Buehler, Griffin, and Ross. No source text was provided in the context, but the concept is well-established in psychology.
Confidence
Solid, with limits

Related

One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.