Once in a while, I stumble upon the same quote again. And every single time, I nod and tell myself “yup, that’s it, absolutely true”.
Today it happened again. And I thought it was time to actually share the quote with others. Maybe you’ve never seen it before and it will help you a lot too.
The quote is:
“You always overestimate whats possible in a short amount of time. But you underestimate whats possible in a longer timespan.”
It’s quite self-explanatory. Humans are terrible at predicting the future, judging the flow of time, taking possible mistakes into account, and so forth. The consequence of this is a severe inability to judge how long something will take in practice. Or how much work it will be. And the quote sums that up nicely.
To this day, even with years of experience, I keep planning more than I could possibly do into a single day. I would write down something like “write 3 chapters for book + fix those 10 blurry images on website + maybe start with that board game idea?”
In theory, this is possible in a day. That’s why I keep writing it down. In practice, however, it really isn’t. It would mean working tirelessly all day, and encountering no obstacles at all. In practice, I might be a bit tired, and an appointment might take longer, and I might lack inspiration, and there are lots of reasons I’m only able to do 1/2 or even 1/3 of what I planned.
Okay, so, stupid me. I learn from this mistake, right? Any time this happens, I tell myself “calm down Tiamo, you can’t work that fast”, and I spread out the work I planned for the rest of the week/month/year. I move things around to create a much more sensible planning. For example, I originally planned to launch my new big online store around the summer, but moved it all the way to next year.
But then I end up being out of work by noon. My planning is so nice and slow that I’ve done my day’s work before I’ve even had lunch. Things I’d planned to release around October are suddenly done in May. And I’m left wondering: what happened here!?
Why do I always feel out of time on any given day? But when I plan accordingly, things get done way faster and take less time than even my worst estimations?
Well, the quote explains it. Humans are simply terrible at this. We overestimate what we can do in an hour or a day, but underestimate what we can do in weeks, months, or seasons.
It’s the same old story of “compounded improvement”. Improving something (or yourself) by 1% every day will cause massive improvement after a year. Improving something by 20% once in a while is far less effective.
It’s why everyone fails their New Year’s resolutions :p On January 1st, everyone goes to the gym and starts working out like crazy. New year, new me, finally I’ll get fit. Then they are sore for weeks, without seeing any improvement, and then they stop going. In one visit to the gym, you simply can’t improve that much. You can’t do that much before your body is tired. But if you visit the gym several times a week, for a year, even if only for some short light exercises, you’d see massive improvement. Unfortunately, most people fail to see this—they clearly haven’t read that quote often enough.
This quote is the answer when people ask me how I get stuff done, usually way before the deadline. How I was able to consistently create many projects for ten years, even as I lacked motivation or energy almost permanently. The short answer, which many people don’t like hearing, is that I don’t have a planning and just put in the same effort every day.
Humans clearly can’t predict the future! Any planning I ever made has failed spectacularly! I plan too much for a single day or week, and then I plan far too little work for the entire month, and now I’ve been flip-flopping between multiple deadlines for my online store launch! (“Oh, wait, we might actually hit a summer release.” => Next week: “No, no, there’s too much work left to do.” => Next week: “Huh, we’re at thirty products already, when did that happen? We might be able to release in the summer anyway.” => Next week: “Not sure if I’ll make it, let’s play it safe and move launch to January 2026.”)
My “planning” is really just a vague suggestion of things that could be done this week. Sometimes I do them all. Sometimes I only manage to do half of that, and move the rest to next week. This list of suggestions is always too long, because I overestimate how much I can do in a (part of a) week.
At the same time, my planning has an even more broad and vague list of “Deadline for X” and “Want to finish these projects the next three months”. And this list is always too short, even though I really really try to estimate it correctly. I’m usually done with all that work for a season … while halfway the season.
Despite my best efforts, this has never changed. I keep overestimating what I can do in a short period of time, and underestimating what happens if you just put in the work every day for a while.
And that’s what I tell myself. Whenever I’m not sure what to do, or a bit tired, or look at the mountain of work needed for something like an online store and threaten to be overwhelmed. I just tell myself “put in your hours of work today, and it will eventually get done”. And it always has. Far more quickly than I estimated. But when, on a bad day, I start telling myself “no no you HAVE to get those chapters done today, otherwise you’re not working fast enough”, that’s when it all breaks down and you get into this toxic, useless mind-set. So I generally try not to beat myself up over any of that.
I put in some effort every day. And even if I truly feel I’m working too slowly, and I won’t get things done before some deadline, I just keep going at the same healthy and maintainable pace. Because experience has shown me, for some twenty years now, that a few hours of work every day will eventually create and complete all enormous projects.
And so I hope others can do the same for their mind-set and health. Simply realizing that this is what humans do can already be a great help. Whenever you get stressed about working too little or too hard. Whenever your (mostly self-imposed) deadlines or to-do items threaten to go by the wayside. Just remind yourself that you’re overestimating what you could possibly be able to do today, but that your underestimating how much you’ll have achieved once the week’s over.
I’m writing this, of course, because I’ve experienced this again the past few weeks. I kept looking at my long list of tasks for the online store and just … being overwhelmed. Thinking it would take me years to make all of that, and get it all nice and profitable. In a useless attempt to achieve this, I wrote down far too many tasks that I should do every day. Several times, I was tempted to completely discard my “webshop plan” anyway, even though it’s a very solid one and I’d put lots of work into it already. But I just told myself this was happening, did a few things (of the much longer to-do list) every day, and now I found myself suddenly with a free evening because all work for “phase 1” of the website was suddenly … done.
It’s always a good idea to split a mountain of work into smaller parts. And so I split all the products I wanted to make into “batches” of related things, allowing me to change what I work on each week and take a break when batches get done. The first two months of this year, I constantly feared falling behind and felt bad about it. But I’d underestimated long-term progress again, and now I was suddenly ahead of schedule.
So I had time to write new articles for the blog again. And go down a rabbit hole of ideas for board games and escape rooms for 4-year-olds. Of course, I really hope to launch that store at the beginning of next year, and be able to show all these nice things I’ve been talking about.
That’s all. Take this quote with you. Be kind to yourself, and apply its wisdom to get lots of stuff done anyway.
Until next time,
Tiamo