Erik forwarded me a post from lifehacks.org on how we tend to overcommit.
Participants believed that both time and money would be more available in “a month” than “today,” and believed it more strongly for time than for money. A deeper investigation of a psychological phenomenon called “delay discounting,” in which people tend to lessen the importance of future rewards, showed that people also discounted future time more than both gains and losses in future money.I can't recall how often I thought this is really a crazy week, but I'll have more time next week, or two weeks from now. Can we do something about it? This is a hard one; the authors observe:
It is difficult to learn from feedback that time will not be more abundant in the future. Specific activities vary from day to day, so [people] do not learn from feedback that, in aggregate, total demands are similar.
