It’s that time of the year again when avalanches of New Year’s resolutions are launched with idealistic plans for drastic self-improvement in 2016. We resolve to quit drinking, smoking, or both.  We resolve to help others, and to spend more time with our friends and family.  We resolve to finally get out of debt, and immediately into building up a neat retirement nest egg.  We resolve to make it into the Guinness Book of Records for the most T-Shirts worn at once. We are great planners, but, regrettably, we are experts only at  planning, not on  planning. Why is that? Because we have the tendency to underestimate the amount of time and effort it would take to complete such massive tasks. Unlike most cognitive biases, there’s a good de-biasing heuristic (= practical method) for this planning fallacy, and the employment of the undermentioned would work for a lot of personal planning scenarios: Use an “outside view” instead of an “inside ......