Last week I published a piece about oversized to-do lists and their adverse effects on productivity. Today, I want to explore why we burden ourselves with an overwhelming number of tasks in the first place.
First, the evidence suggests that human beings are biologically programmed to add. In his book, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, University of Virginia professor Leidy Klotz points to a study that presented participants with a pattern of squares on a computer screen. Subjects were tasked with making the pattern symmetrical across a single dividing line — symmetry could be achieved by either adding squares or taking them away. When the results came in, they skewed heavily in favor of adding: 80 percent of participants were more likely to tack on squares rather than remove them in order to realize symmetry. Despite requiring the same amount of physical effort (the click of a mouse), subtraction proved to be a far less popular route to the desired end of a matching pattern.1
Klotz’s book highlights even more research on the human bias towards addition. On the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, participants in a study were escorted to a workstation where a lego structure was positioned on a small desk; additional lego blocks sat in a pile off to the side. Participants were free to alter the lego structure as they wished. Upon completion, the structures were returned to researchers, who counted the total number of blocks added, removed, and/or moved. Again, addition topped subtraction by a wide margin: just 12 percent of the transformed lego structures featured fewer blocks than their originals had.2
When Klotz’s team extended its research to music, it stumbled upon similar findings. Subjects were asked to change random loops of musical notes—they were three times more likely to add notes than to get rid of them. Even soup joined the club. Participants in a study were asked to transform a five-ingredient soup; just two out of ninety jettisoned ingredients. How about vacation? Yep, you guessed it: more adding. Subjects were told to improve an itinerary for a day spent in Washington, D.C. They were dealt an ambitious travel plan that spanned fourteen hours and featured stops at a litany of historical sites, memorials, and monuments. Still, participants jammed more into the schedule to the tune of 75 percent. Only a quarter of those studied wound up crossing items off the to-do list.3
The evidence gathered by Klotz and company makes it abundantly clear that human beings have an inborn desire for more. This innate drive to add could be the reason why your boss continues to throw more assignments, tasks, and projects your way, even as you are struggling to keep your head above water at work.
However, something else seems to be contributing to our penchant for overextending ourselves (and our employees), namely, hard-wired optimism. Researchers Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross tackled this issue in a 1994 paper that focused on studies of college students. In the first study, thirty-seven students in an Honors Thesis course were asked to predict as accurately as possible when they would submit their finished thesis. Respondents predicted, on average, that they would finish in 33.9 days; in reality, they took an average of 55.5 days to turn in the project.4
Things got more interesting when students were asked to forecast the turn-in date given “everything went as poorly as it possibly could.” Even then, they expected to have the thesis done after an average of 48.6 days, an entire week shy of the actual completion date. Despite considering the worst case scenario, the respondents still found a way to underestimate how long the paper would take.5
It is not just young adults with homework who have fallen victim to this chemically encoded positivity. History is replete with examples of projects that took far longer to finish than anticipated. In 1871, the then-colony British Columbia agreed to join Canada so long as a transcontinental railroad reached the West Coast by the predicted date of 1881—in 1885, the railway was still being built. In 1969, the mayor of Montreal, Quebec announced plans for a new, retractable-roof stadium meant for hosting that year’s Olympic Games. He went on to declare that the entire cost of hosting the competition would cost $120 million. Two decades later, the roof was still incomplete and cost $120 million on its own.6
Perhaps the worst case of plans winding up entirely divorced from reality resides Down Under in Australia. In 1957, the Sydney Opera House was expected to open in 1963 at a cost of $7 million. Sixteen years and $102 million later, the ribbon was finally cut on the opera house project, rendering the original estimates nothing short of laughable.7
What all of this tells us is that human beings are not particularly skilled at estimating how much time projects are going to require. We seem to have an inbuilt confidence that we can get things done more quickly than we actually can. This has serious implications for the workplace. When our bosses underestimate how long a task is going to take, it leaves more room in the schedule for extra assignments and initiatives. Given what we have learned about the psychological urge to add, it is no wonder managers and supervisors are inclined to fill the “free space” created by their faulty predictions with even more work for the rest of us. If we are going to finally liberate ourselves from the problem of having too much to do, we must first look to our own programming and find the strength to defy our own biological predispositions.
Citations:
1. Klotz, L. (2021). Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Flatiron Books.
2. Klotz, L.
3. Klotz, L.
4. Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994, March 10). Exploring the “Planning Fallacy”: Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion Times. https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/biases/67_J_Personality_and_Social_Psychology_366,_1994.pdf?ref=warpnews.org
5. Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M.
6. Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M.
7. Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M.