Effects Of Time Planning Direction On Perdictions Of Task Completion Time

In our daily life and work,people often tend to be overly optimistic,which is commonly underestimate the time needed to complete tasks,this kind of phenomenon known as the planning fallacy.The phenomenon of planning fallacy is closely related to our life,it is necessary to examine a strategy that might counter these problems and help people to reduce the negative impact of this phenomenon.Our research was inspired by ideas gaining currency in applied fields of project management,where practitioners advocate the use of backward planning,we expected the strategy of backward planning may lead people to generate more realistic,predictions of task completion time when planning for the future events.Backward planning involves starting a plan at the end of goal and then working through required steps in reverse-chronological order.The method of situation testing was used to explore the effects of planning direction on predictions of task completion time,and try to discover the effectiveness of the backward planning strategy when compared with the traditional forward planning strategy.In the experiment,the participants were asked to use the different planning direction(backward planning condition,forward planning condition,unspecified planning direction)to design a plan for the situation task and predict when the task will be finished.Draw the following conclusions: Participants would predict later completion times in the backward condition than in the forward and unspecified conditions;Participants experience novel greater planning insights(such as perceived the potential problem or obstacle)and pay more attention to the factors that delay the task in the backward condition than in the forward condition and unspecified condition;The different types of tasks also affect the predictions of task completion time.