Hofstadter’s law

“The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other reasons, for coining ‘Hofstadter’s law’, which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, ‘even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’. In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. It follows from this that the standard advice about planning – to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need – could actually make matters worse.”

Excerpt From: Oliver Burkeman. “Four Thousand Weeks.”