Handle things while they’re small to beat the planning fallacy every time

People are terrible at estimating time. The planning fallacy says we underpredict duration even when we know similar tasks took longer before. The antidote is to make tasks smaller and reality come sooner. You write three micro-steps on a sticky note and precommit to the first one right after coffee. The mug is warm, the desk is clear, and the bar to begin is low enough that you just start.

Two micro-anecdotes help. A student who always pulled all-nighters broke her paper into five 20-minute moves and did a five-minute pre-mortem. She spotted that sources were the bottleneck and asked a librarian on day one. A product team scheduled an early 20% review where they cut scope by a third, then finished on time. Small and early beat big and late.

Research on implementation intentions shows that cue-based plans like “after breakfast, I will start the outline” increase follow-through. Pre-mortems leverage our negativity bias for good by imagining failure in advance and preventing it. Early reviews catch drift before sunk-cost bias locks us into bad paths. I might be wrong, but the combo of micro-steps, cues, pre-mortems, and early checks systematically removes the reasons projects slip.

You’ll still adjust, but you’ll adjust while it’s cheap. That’s the whole game: make reality show up while the stakes are small and the choices are many. Then you can steer with ease.

Write 3–7 micro-steps on a sticky note and tie the first one to a cue you know will happen, like right after coffee. Spend five minutes on a pre-mortem, jot three likely failure points, and write a one-line prevention for each. Put a 15-minute review on the calendar at 20% progress so you can cut scope, ask for help, or course-correct before costs rise. Keep everything small, early, and visible. Start with the first micro-step tomorrow morning.