Alongside my main research work, I’ve developed a strong interest in improving how we manage research projects and academic workflows. Academia is full of bad habits, perhaps the most common is the tendency for projects to run over time, often brushed off with a resigned “well, we are in academia.” But more often than not, these delays are the result of plain, everyday mismanagement: meetings without agendas that drift endlessly, email threads that melt away whole afternoons, beautifully formatted Gantt charts that are never revisited, and a romantic belief that brilliance excuses lateness.
We aim to build a team culture that respects and manages time wisely. We come from a range of backgrounds, including professional athletics and the military, which helps bring discipline to our work. We set realistic timelines, try to keep calendars no more than 80% full, respect deadlines, and proactively communicate if something might not be delivered on time. And yet, despite all of this, things still take longer than we expect. I still do. It recently took me three years to publish a paper that I had expected would take one. A method I’ve been eager to implement has taken far longer to generate its first publication. Even a simple personal goal, planting a particular tree in my father’s garden, remains just a plan, despite good intentions.
This all keeps me wondering: how can we be more efficient, not just in theory, but in the messy reality of daily life?
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wouldn’t be surprised. More than forty years ago, they described the planning fallacy: the human tendency to underestimate the time, cost, and risk involved in future tasks, even when past experience offers plenty of contradictory evidence. It’s closely related to optimism bias, the comforting belief that positive outcomes are more likely for us than for others, regardless of the odds.
Early humans who believed “I can reach that valley before the snow arrives” or “I can cross that river before nightfall” were more likely to explore, take risks, and discover new resources. Their confidence, even when occasionally punished, was often rewarded, and those rare wins were enough to keep the trait alive across generations. Dopamine fuelled their drive to act, and over time, this instinct to overestimate what’s possible became a lasting part of how we’re psychologically shaped.
Recently, I listened to a podcast interview with Daniel Kahneman, whose Thinking, Fast and Slow has earned a permanent place on my bookshelf. He spoke about time optimism, the belief that we can accomplish more in less time than is realistically possible. Paradoxically, he credits this very bias with enabling him to write the book at all. Without time optimism, he said, he might never have even started.
So what if being late is actually okay? And what if the real issue isn’t how to be more efficient in the messy reality of daily life but whether that’s even the right question to ask? Perhaps we should accept that a dose of time optimism is not only natural, but essential for achieving great things, so long as it’s balanced with solid routines and realistic planning. Without that optimism, we might never dare to begin the most complex and ambitious projects in the first place. That three-year paper is a great paper that laid the foundation for other fantastic science; it reshaped how I think and write. And the tree I still owe my father, well, it will soon be planted. He’s 84 now, and I want to share that moment with him.
The lesson is this: let’s stay time optimistic for the crazy, beautiful, life-shaping ideas, and time realistic for the small, everyday tasks that carry us toward them.
May 2025
