You Are Not Bad at Time. You Are Bad at Honesty.

Originally shared in Tuesday Notes on May 26, 2026.

I am three years into my psychology degree and this is the first semester I actually know what is coming.

Not because the workload changed. Because I finally built a tracker (thanks Claude 🙂). University assignments, deadlines, Euda Studio, work, social commitments, all of it in one place. And what I saw when I laid it all out honestly surprised me. I had been operating on a version of my schedule that existed only in my head, optimistic, vague, and completely disconnected from reality. No wonder I felt quietly overwhelmed and a little lost, I was trying to optimize time and energy I had never actually looked at.

Sound familiar?

This is called planning fallacy. The bias that makes you think the essay will take two hours, the project will be done by Friday, and your inbox will be cleared before lunch. It is not laziness or poor discipline. It is your brain defaulting to the best case scenario every single time, even when your entire history of doing the thing tells you otherwise.

Psychologists Kahneman and Tversky identified it in 1979. Decades of research later, we still do it. Chronically. Collectively. Even when we know about it.

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Tuesday Brain Snack

The reason planning fallacy is so stubborn is that when we plan, we imagine the task in isolation. We picture ourselves sitting down, focused, executing. We do not picture the interruptions, the energy dips, the thing that always comes up. Psychologists call this the inside view. And conversely, the fix is the outside view: instead of asking "how long will this take?" ask "how long did something like this actually take last time?"

Your past self is a more honest planner than your optimistic present self.

The Reframe

When you are planning something, add a buffer you think is embarrassingly large. Then add a little more.

The point is not to become pessimistic. It is to stop planning for a version of yourself who never gets tired, never gets interrupted, and never has a day where everything just takes longer. That person (unfortunately) does not exist. The real you, the one who gets distracted and needs breaks and occasionally stares at the wall for twenty minutes, is the one who actually has to do the work. Plan for her instead.

What surprised me most about the tracker was not how busy I was. It was how much lighter I felt once everything was finally out of my head and on a page. The dread was never about the workload. It was about carrying a vague, shapeless sense of "too much" with no edges to it.

Naming the thing shrinks it. Seeing the thing shrinks it more.

So this week, pick one thing you have been quietly underestimating, and give it an honest look. Not the version in your head. The real one.

This week's question: what is something that always takes you longer than you think it will, and what would change if you finally planned for the truth of it?

Until next Tuesday, much love,

Claudia