Recently an acquaintance told me we had to be leaving at “4:00 PM sharp.”
Knowing of the planning fallacy, I asked “Sharp? Uh-oh. As a primate animal, I naturally tend not to be very good with sharp deadlines, though your information is useful. Could you tell me when we’re leaving smooth?”
“Smooth? What do you mean?”
“Smooth as opposed to sharp. Like, suppose you told me the time I should be aiming to be ready for in order to compensate for the fact that humans are bad at estimating time costs. Let’s say you wanted to create a significant buffer between the time I was ready and the time I had to be ready by; the beginning of that significant buffer is the time we’re leaving by smooth.”
Since then, we’ve been saying things in the structure “X smooth, Y sharp”, where X and Y are times or amounts of time. It’s intuitive, catchy, simple, and very useful.
Deadlines: X Smooth, Y Sharp
Recently an acquaintance told me we had to be leaving at “4:00 PM sharp.”
Knowing of the planning fallacy, I asked “Sharp? Uh-oh. As a primate animal, I naturally tend not to be very good with sharp deadlines, though your information is useful. Could you tell me when we’re leaving smooth?”
“Smooth? What do you mean?”
“Smooth as opposed to sharp. Like, suppose you told me the time I should be aiming to be ready for in order to compensate for the fact that humans are bad at estimating time costs. Let’s say you wanted to create a significant buffer between the time I was ready and the time I had to be ready by; the beginning of that significant buffer is the time we’re leaving by smooth.”
Since then, we’ve been saying things in the structure “X smooth, Y sharp”, where X and Y are times or amounts of time. It’s intuitive, catchy, simple, and very useful.