Ever notice how a quick weekend project always takes three weeks? That's the Planning Fallacy in action.
Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky named it in 1979.[1] It describes a deep-rooted tendency to underestimate the time, cost, and risk of anything we take on.[3] The catch is that knowing about it doesn't fix it.
Roger Buehler put that to the test.[2] Students were asked to name the date they were 99% certain their project would be finished. Not their optimistic guess. The date they were virtually sure about. Fewer than half made it.
Caution didn't save them either. Asked to imagine everything going as badly as it possibly could, students predicted they'd be done in 48.6 days. The actual average was 55.5. Reality came in worse than the worst case they could picture.
What this means
We don't plan for our actual lives. We plan for a perfect week where the car never breaks down, meetings always end on time, and we never just feel exhausted.
When we estimate a task, we take the absolute best-case scenario and assume that's the baseline. It's why governments go decades over schedule on building a bridge, and it's why a daily habit plan usually just feels like setting yourself up to fail. We are bad at guessing when life is going to get in the way.
How does this apply to habits?
Every habit plan is a prediction about your life, and predictions about your own life are the exact thing this research says we're worst at.
Which means the plan was never the place to solve this. Careful estimates came in optimistic. Pessimistic ones did too. What's left is a plan that doesn't need the prediction to be right.
What we built instead
That's why we developed the Floor: as long as you show up once a week, you've succeeded. When the busy week, the low energy week, or the week when who knows what happened shows up, you're fine. You're not behind. Show up once that week and you've succeeded.
Miss a week, or a few, and nothing is lost. There's no counter to reset and no chain to rebuild. Whenever you're ready, show up once next week and you're back.
It might seem like once a week isn't a lot, but the Floor is only the bottom of your range. You set your own goal above it, and you're going to hit that some weeks. Hit it regularly and you'll get a suggestion to raise it.
Even if you only ever showed up once a week, that's 52 sessions and a year of showing up. The worst outcome is still a massive success, and building from a years history of showing up is easier than starting from 0.
