Your last "six-month project" probably took eighteen months, and the pattern isn't bad luck-it's the planningfallacy, a systematic bias where competent people underestimate their own timelines even when they know theerror by name. Part of The Bias Files, Simon Blackwood's insightful book explores why informed professionalsconsistently miss deadlines, blow budgets, and underestimate failure probability in their own plans-even afterstudying the exact cognitive trap they are about to repeat.This is not a productivity system, a project management framework, or a guide to "realistic thinking." It is adocumented investigation of one repeating error across eight real-world domains, showing why optimisticforecasting survives experience, expertise, and direct statistical warning.Through documented cases and composite scenarios, you will see the recurring mechanisms that drive timelinefailure:- The Ten-Year Overrun: Why the Sydney Opera House, budgeted at 7 million dollars and four years,ultimately cost fourteen times the estimate and took a decade-not from dishonesty, but from productionmethods that made the original figures nearly useless the moment construction began.- The Book That Was Due Last Spring: How a novelist who finished her first book in two yearsconfidently promises twelve months for her second and delivers in twenty-six, despite knowing her ownworking rhythm, tracking her historical pace, and having sketched an evenly divided chapter-by-chapterplan.- The Founder's Launch Date: Why Boeing's 787 Dreamliner missed its 2008 delivery target by more thanthree years, following a sequence of delays across a distributed supply chain where every major contractorunderestimated assembly complexity at their own production node.
