Prioritising with realistic timelines: what research supports
A priority list can be coherent yet impossible to deliver. The management question is specific: what information should inform timelines so that the team does not commit to more work than it can absorb?
What the literature establishes
Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross (1994, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that people can underestimate their completion times while knowing that previous tasks took longer than expected. Their research highlights attention to future scenarios rather than past experience. In one of their studies, explicitly asking participants to connect those experiences to their predictions reduced this bias.
The mechanism: taking an outside view
Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo (1993, Management Science) distinguish an inside view, focused on the project scenario, from an outside view, based on outcomes in comparable cases. Their article offers a theoretical framework for understanding how forecasts can remain optimistic despite an apparently cautious approach to risk. For prioritisation, this framework suggests checking proposed timelines against past outcomes before committing team capacity.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that every estimate simply needs a buffer. These studies do not, however, provide a universal correction factor. An arbitrary allowance cannot replace examining dependencies, approval delays and differences between genuinely comparable tasks. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot guarantee
Studies of individual predictions do not amount to direct validation in a watchmaking workshop or a microelectronics team. The article on inside and outside views is a conceptual framework, not an intervention trial in these sectors. In practice, historical records become less informative if they mix active working time with elapsed calendar time or overlook scope changes.
A practical check in Neuchâtel
As part of SHR’s “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, a Neuchâtel team working in microtechnology, watchmaking or precision microelectronics could trial a forecasting log over four weeks. For one category of recurring deliverables, the team would record the predicted elapsed time before committing, then the actual time from start to acceptance, noting scope changes and approval delays. The measure would be the median signed difference, “actual minus predicted elapsed time”, in days, reported alongside the number of deliverables observed: a positive value would indicate underestimation in that sample. The result would inform commitments for the next cycle, without being presented as causal evidence of the training’s effectiveness. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Neuchâtel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Neuchâtel
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