quantmleap

Jesse Wegman wrote an article in the Slate magazine titled “Cookbook writers are ridiculously bad at guessing how long it’ll take to prepare a meal“.

I’ve consulted with my wife, who happens to be a much better and experienced cook than me, and she says that from her perspective it is likely that the cookbooks assume that all ingredients and tools have already been prepared well before the actual assembly has started, so if you discount the preparation time it is possible to ‘construct’ the dish within the specified timeframes.

Now honestly, I don’t know why, but for some reason or another this discussion has made me think about the poor state of task duration estimation and how unreliable a considerable number of them seem to be.

Can you help me figure out why my brain took me down this bizarre thinking path?

Think about it!

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