A phrase that I have too often said and heard is the single phrase “that shouldn’t be too hard”. As soon as those words are uttered you can estimate that the task being discussed will take two to three times as long. This is something I’ve noticed. Well the thing that makes this even more concrete is Norman’s Law. This law, derived from Hofstader’s Law, basically states that your project will always take longer than anticipated…even when you take into account Hofstader’s Law.

So, if we consider this, our opinions to justify and give comfort to the person attempting to complete the task tend to make this task infinitely more complex. I never understood why we do this to ourselves. And to top it off, I cannot reason why I continually make the statement.

This came up the other day when I asked someone to complete a task, but in the last couple days of developing the solution myself, I’ve gone through a series of rewrites and architectural changes already and it will still probably take a couple hours to flesh out the last issues.

I suppose that we think it’s easier on ourselves if we think the task can be done easily. Thus we make the statements and disregard anything about Hofstader estimating that the task will be small and provide us with an easy win. Either that or it’s the daze that we are in from the last task like that that provides a haze over the complexity of what we want to accomplish…I’m going to vote on the latter.