Why You’ve Fallen Behind In Your Homeschool Plan

Have you fallen behind in your homeschool plan? Do you want to avoid looking at your lesson planner because it’s so depressing? If that’s you, I have good news. This is The Homeschool Sanity Show, the episode where we'll get back on track. Sponsor: 5000 Blankets Movie It's incredible what can happen when you transform your heart to serve the people around you.Catch 5000 BLANKETS exclusively in theaters for two days only! December 12 & 13. Tickets at https://www.fathomevents.com/events/5000-Blankets The Planning Fallacy Now the good news: There’s nothing wrong with you! You’ve just fallen victim to a human thinking error that’s characteristic of some of the smartest people. It’s called the planning fallacy. It means we tend to underestimate how much time projects take, even when we have experience that has taught us better. So you tell yourself you can get the science experiment part of your curriculum done in half an hour, even though they’ve taken you at least three times as long in the past. Why are we irrational this way? Because we also have an optimism bias—especially when it comes to our own abilities. I’ve been watching a baking show, a baking competition in which bakers make elaborate baked goods in a very short amount of time. Even though a baker will admit to never having made the recipe at home under the time limit, she hopes that she will for the competition. She hopes. It’s a kind of magical thinking that we’re all guilty of at times. You’ve never made it to co-op in under ten minutes, but you hope you will today—somehow. Why do we have this optimism bias and this magical thinking about the future? Researchers have a number of theories: First, we use the best-case scenario in our planning. For example, we tell ourselves we can get to church in six minutes because of that one time when every light was green. Second, we plan this way because we want to believe that our scenario will happen. We avoid the disappointment of admitting that there is no possible way we can complete two foreign language curricula in one year. Third, we honestly don't remember how long a similar project took. We think the math lesson took ten minutes to complete when it actually took 20. Fourth, we emphasize the differences between the current project and a past one. Yes, science experiments took forever last year, but now you're organized. And your kids are more mature. Fifth, long-term deadlines promote poorer time estimates. We do worse in realistically planning for a full school year than we do for this week. Sixth, we focus on the variables that we can control, forgetting that much of the most time-consuming parts of our day are unexpected and out of our control. We don't know that our printer will stop working right when we go to print the lab worksheets or that the dog will get out of the yard as we're about to start the art lesson. How to Overcome the Planning Fallacy I don't know about you, but I'm getting depressed. Maybe we should scrap our homeschool plan and just see what happens? Depending on your homeschool laws, you might not have that choice. Or you know that you get far less done without a plan. So you'd still like to plan in such a way that you don't fall far behind. How can we do that? First, instead of using a best-case scenario,