Twice as Long: Why Deadlines, Budgets, and Timelines Always Fail-And the One Tool to Fix Them
Blackwood, Simon
Synopsis "Twice as Long: Why Deadlines, Budgets, and Timelines Always Fail-And the One Tool to Fix Them"
Your last "six-month project" probably took eighteen months, and the pattern isn't bad luck-it's the planning fallacy, a systematic bias where competent people underestimate their own timelines even when they know the error by name. Part of The Bias Files, Simon Blackwood's insightful book explores why informed professionals consistently miss deadlines, blow budgets, and underestimate failure probability in their own plans-even after studying the exact cognitive trap they are about to repeat. This is not a productivity system, a project management framework, or a guide to "realistic thinking." It is a documented investigation of one repeating error across eight real-world domains, showing why optimistic forecasting survives experience, expertise, and direct statistical warning. Through documented cases and composite scenarios, you will see the recurring mechanisms that drive timeline failure: - The Ten-Year Overrun: Why the Sydney Opera House, budgeted at 7 million dollars and four years, ultimately cost fourteen times the estimate and took a decade-not from dishonesty, but from production methods that made the original figures nearly useless the moment construction began. - The Book That Was Due Last Spring: How a novelist who finished her first book in two years confidently promises twelve months for her second and delivers in twenty-six, despite knowing her own working rhythm, tracking her historical pace, and having sketched an evenly divided chapter-by-chapter plan. - The Founder's Launch Date: Why Boeing's 787 Dreamliner missed its 2008 delivery target by more than three years, following a sequence of delays across a distributed supply chain where every major contractor underestimated assembly complexity at their own production node.
