Working while parenting can feel a little like juggling flaming swords. Everything works fine(ish) as long as nothing surprises you. But there will always be “come pick up your feverish kid” calls from daycare and last-minute project deadlines during little league games. So you end up defending your commitment to work while agonizing over having missed your child’s game-winning home run.
According to a recent Pew Research Center study, working parents feel like they’re “supposed to work like [they] don’t have kids and parent like [they] don’t have a job.” That’s because our workplaces and other institutions are still set up under the assumption that every employee has a stay-at-home spouse who takes care of the children.
In general, parents do want to work. They just don’t want to feel like they’re missing out on their kids’ childhood and their own self-care.
While there’s nothing an individual parent or household can do to fix the system that tries to squeeze 28 hours of productivity out of an average day, you can change how you think about your time–which will lead to finding more of it. Here’s how:
You’re probably falling for the planning fallacy
Although the local middle school is only 7 minutes away by car, my 12-year-old son was just barely on time nearly every day of 6th grade, and tardy the rest of the time.
While “hustle” is not a quality anyone associates with this child, his repeated lateness was entirely his parents’ fault. Because we somehow believed, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that it would only take an hour for us to successfully get ourselves, our pets, our middle-schooler, and our high-schooler fed, dressed, caffeinated, packed up, and out the door each morning.
We fell victim to a cognitive bias–the planning fallacy. First coined in 1979 by economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the planning fallacy describes the ubiquitous human tendency to underestimate the amount of time it will take to complete a task, even if you have plenty of experience with similar tasks taking longer.
We blunder into this fallacy for two main reasons: we’re biased toward optimistic outcomes and we remain anchored to our original plan.
In the case of getting out the door in the morning, my spouse and I hold onto our unwarranted optimism that no one would bicker, misplace their homework, have a life-shattering hangnail, lose the coffee, let the dog experience unearned freedom sans leash, spill cranberry juice on the clean laundry, or start bleeding–let alone all of them in one morning.
And my belief that it takes an hour to get out the door was a holdover from my single days, when I was only responsible for myself. (You’d think I would remember that my punctuality was still not guaranteed back then.)
In our house, the planning fallacy meant stressful mornings (and the occasional grumpy preteen) for us–but it can also steal working parents’ free time.
How the planning fallacy is stealing your time
Nearly six out of ten working parents take care of work-related tasks while they’re with their children, according to the Pew Research Center study, while a solid 70% of parents deal with parenting tasks while they are at work.
Some of this blurring of boundaries can be attributed to the unreasonable expectations placed on working parents. If you need to make a call to a teacher, orthodontist, or camp, it’s pretty much impossible to avoid doing so during working hours. And employees often have more work than they can complete during a typical workday.
But a great deal of each week’s waking hours can fall prey to the planning fallacy. For example, let’s say you tell your boss you can complete a report by the following Monday. Which you could have done, if everything went off without a hitch.
But on Wednesday morning you discover that the Jenkins file you need for the report is corrupted and you have to spend hours with IT. Then your daughter has a half day on Thursday and you can’t get any work done that afternoon. And on Friday, the office has a mandatory team-building exercise to plant trees together.
At this point, the only way to get the report done by the deadline is to work through the weekend, since the time has to come from somewhere. But that means missing out on family time–as well as time for household chores, grocery shopping, and self-care, all of which can help stave off future planning fallacy issues.
The alternative would be to ask your boss for an extension on the report–but that assumes a level of flexibility and understanding that most employees don’t necessarily have.
If only you could go back in time and tell your boss you’d have the report to him by next Monday instead.
How to take your time back
One of the most irksome aspects of the planning fallacy is how difficult it is to combat. No matter how logical, proactive, or forward-thinking you may be, you are likely to always underestimate how long tasks will take, even if you are familiar with similar tasks.
That’s because humans have a hard enough time understanding the probability of single events, so we can barely wrap our minds around compound probabilities. Which means our plans generally assume everything will be typical.
This is why Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter coined the following law:
“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
However, despite the challenges, there are things that working parents can do to combat the planning fallacy and take their time back:
- Add time to every estimate: Get in the habit of padding the amount of time you plan for everything you do, both at work and at home. Giving yourself more time than you assume you’ll need on work projects can help set boundaries around your home life, while padding your estimates on kid stuff can reduce family stress. That means you’ll likely spend less time having to deal with the fallout of tired, cranky kids.
- Befriend the Sunday Reset: We usually fall victim to the planning fallacy because of unexpected snags we couldn’t see coming–but let’s not forget about all those known monkey wrenches that we just forgot to put on the calendar. (Random school spirit weeks, I’m looking at you!) That’s where the Sunday Reset can help. This weekly planning session lets you prepare for the next seven days and feel ready for the coming week.
- Do something today that you’ll be glad for tomorrow: Anything you can do now that can make your life easier in the future will help you protect your time. For example, taking a second to put your keys on the hook means you won’t be scrambling to find them in the morning–which reduces the likelihood of falling victim to the morning out-the-door planning fallacy, which protects you from creating an entire domino effect of wasted time.
Creating some breathing room
Working and parenting in 2026 is not for the faint of heart. Our workplaces still expect employees to commit to the office like there’s a stay-at-home parent holding down the fort at home, while we’re committed to more hands-on parenting than the benign neglect we received.
All this commitment leaves us with very little time for ourselves, our friends, or our hobbies, and with plenty of guilty feelings, to boot.
While individuals can’t fix the systemic assumptions that make workplaces so tough for parents, changing how you look at time can help you find more hours for yourself and your family.
Specifically, recognizing how you may be falling for the planning fallacy can help you reclaim several hours per week. The planning fallacy is a nearly universal cognitive bias that leads us to consistently underestimate the length of time it will take to complete a task, even if we have experience with similar tasks taking much longer. The underestimation is a result of a combination of optimism and anchoring, in part because humans struggle to comprehend compound probabilities.
When parents fall prey to the planning fallacy at work, they must make up for the underestimated time somewhere else–which usually means missing out on time with their children. And when it happens at home, it can cause stressful situations that might bleed into work time, as overtired kids have meltdowns and refuse to go to daycare.
Though it’s incredibly difficult to overcome the planning fallacy, padding your time estimates, doing a Sunday Reset every week, and trying to make things easier for your future self can all help you combat it.
Putting these three strategies together can help you reduce the effects of the planning fallacy, and start buying you some free time for yourself.
