Whenever we took a family trip, my stepdad had us awake at the crack of dawn. It didn’t matter if the flight left at 9 a.m., 11 a.m., or somehow not until 1. We were piling into the car while I was still trying to add up just how much sleep I’d lost.
It annoyed me then, and it still does a little. But psychology has given me one reason to respect his system: people are surprisingly bad at estimating how long things take. Getting somewhere ridiculously early is one crude but effective way around that.
People plan for the version of the trip where everything goes right
Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identified something they called the planning fallacy: the tendency to underestimate how long tasks take, even when you’ve been wrong about this before.
The reason is in how you picture the future.
When you’re thinking about getting to the airport, you imagine the plan going smoothly. Leave at 7:30, drive takes 35 minutes, security takes 15, walk to the gate, sit down, done. You’re building a mental movie of the best-case version and treating it like the most likely one.
What you’re not picturing: the kid who forgot their shoes, the stretch of highway where two lanes become one because of construction, the parking garage that’s full, the security line that snakes around a corner you’ve never seen it reach before.
Each of those is ordinary. Together they can add 45 minutes to a morning you budgeted no room for.
Roger Buehler, a psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University who has studied this bias for decades, found something that makes it even more frustrating.
When he asked psychology students to predict when they’d finish their senior thesis, only about a third finished by their own deadline. The rest took longer, sometimes much longer.
And these weren’t people new to big projects. They knew similar work had taken them longer before. They just treated this time as different.
That’s the same thing you’re doing when you budget exactly 35 minutes for a drive that’s taken 50 the last three times.
This isn’t just an airport problem
The same bias is running every time you think you can shower, get dressed, pack a bag, answer one email, and leave the house in 20 minutes. Or when you assume a bathroom renovation will take one weekend.
Or when you promise something at work by Friday because you’re picturing the work itself and forgetting the three meetings, twelve emails, and one surprise request that will surround it.
Kahneman called the mistake “taking the inside view.” You focus on the specifics of this particular task, imagine yourself doing it step by step, and arrive at a number that feels reasonable. What would help is the “outside view”: looking at how long similar things have taken you in the past and using that as your guide instead.
But people almost never do that.
Buehler found that even the most organized, conscientious people underestimate how long things take. They finish faster than procrastinators do, but they still miss their own deadlines. The bias doesn’t care how disciplined you are. It cares that you’re imagining the plan instead of remembering the pattern.
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The person who gets there three hours early is planning for the mess
Come back to the boomer at the airport.
Your stepdad, your mom, the older traveler in line ahead of you with a paperback and absolutely nowhere to be: they’re building what Kahneman would call the outside view into their schedule, whether they know the term or not.
Traffic will happen. Somebody will forget something. Parking will take longer than it should. Security could be ugly. The gate could be a fifteen-minute walk from the checkpoint.
They’re not necessarily estimating each step more precisely. They’re adding enough slack that being wrong about any single one doesn’t matter. That’s why the habit looks excessive right up until something goes wrong, and then it looks like the only plan that ever made sense.
My stepdad wasn’t immune to the planning fallacy. He’d misjudged how long things would take plenty of times. The difference was that he’d been wrong often enough to stop trusting his own estimates. No generation has a patent on that. A few decades of close calls will teach it to anyone who’s paying attention.
There’s also a practical side that’s easy to miss when you’re young and quick on your feet:
A 60-year-old doesn’t cover the distance from security to a far gate at the same pace as a 30-year-old. Neither does someone managing a bad knee, a rolling bag and a cane, or a connection through an unfamiliar terminal. The extra buffer isn’t always about worry. Sometimes the math is genuinely different when the body has slowed down.
The early arrival might look like anxiety. For a lot of people, it’s experience doing its job.
Three hours at the gate isn’t the answer either
That said, too much buffer does waste time. And plenty of people estimate travel well enough to make their flights without memorizing the carpet pattern at Gate B17. Arriving absurdly early isn’t automatically the smarter move.
The point isn’t that everyone should adopt my stepdad’s method. It’s that most of us plan as though every step will go cleanly, and the person who builds in room for the version where something doesn’t has a better track record than the person counting on a miracle.
I still don’t think we needed to leave quite as early as he insisted. But I understand the logic now. The rest of us were planning for the trip we hoped we’d have. He was planning for the one people usually have.
