I have come to accept that I will rarely accomplish 100% of the things I start the day thinking I can do.
It’s Hofstadter’s Law which states that it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
There are plenty of reasons why this is, chief among them: stuff comes up.
A colleague asks you an urgent question, you run out of bandaids and need to make a quick run to the pharmacy, you get a headache, the problem you’re working on is taking longer to solve. The list is infinite.
Getting less than expected done isn’t so much a problem to solve as it is a thing to accept.
There is a healthy amount of sanity to be gained on the other end of this acceptance as well.
What’s the difference between getting 80% of the things you were planning on doing versus all of them?
In practice, nothing really. The remaining 20% is meaningless — it represents a portion of work that you, and frankly most people on any given day, were unlikely to get to under even the best of circumstances.
The 80% on the other hand — or whatever you got done — that means everything. That’s what was actually realistic.
