Is there a more reliable source of disappointment anywehre in the world than my own daily To Do list?
In 10,000 days have I ever looked down and said, "yes - all done"? Not once.
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Turns out I'm not alone. Olympic games, high speed rail - even vaccines - generally take longer and cost more than expected. ( @BentFlyvbjerg knows this sad story all too well).

Covid vaccine development, of course, has famously shattered all records. No complaints there...
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But vaccine manufacturing? Not so much.
@rasbech told me recently on 'How To Vaccinate The World' that...
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...covid vaccine manufacturers projected they would produce 800 million doses by the end of 2020. The reality was something between 20 million and 30 million doses.
Amazing. Same productivity rate (2-3%) as my daily to do list.
But then this stuff is hard to make. Who knew?
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A classic study of the 'planning fallacy' at a small scale was conducted by psychologist Roger Buehler and colleagues in the early 1990s.
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They asked a group of undergraduates to predict how long it would take to submit their honours thesis and to consider upside and downside scenarios — “if everything went as well as it possibly could” and “if everything went as poorly as it possibly could”.
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The students’ optimistic estimate was 28 days and their baseline guess not much longer: 34 days. The worst-case scenario estimate was 49 days. The reality? Fifty-six days.
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If you want to find out more - including Daniel Kahneman's cure for the planning fallacy (and why even for Daniel Kahneman, the cure is no panacea) - then check out my @FTMag column.
And yes, it did take longer to write than I had planned.
8/ https://www.ft.com/content/e79f0a2a-1de6-44e3-9804-22896deae8b0