Ever self-planned a 90-day challenge to be fluent in your target language?

Or gave yourself one week to master all the verbal tenses?

Did it succeed?

If the answer is no, welcome to the club, you’ve fallen into the “Planning Fallacy” trap.

The Planning Fallacy is a well-known cognitive bias that states we’re very bad at making realistic plans.

In fact, most people tend to overestimate their abilities to complete a plan.

Knowing this bias is especially crucial for autonomous language learners.

Learning on your own is already very challenging, so failing to meet your own expectations can be a huge motivation breaker.

How to avoid being subject to this bias? Here are my own recommendations:

Double down each deadline.

After having rationally planned your learning, just push back the deadline twice as far away. It’s a simple heuristic, but it’s better than nothing.

Plan a worst-case and a best-case plan.

A question I like to ask myself is: what’s the minimal routine I am sure I can commit to, no matter what happens?

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll probably find out that the answer is 10 or 15 minutes total a day, and that’s ok.

Because first, if your routine is smart enough, you can already achieve great results. And second, you’ll definitely do more than this minimalist plan in the course of several weeks or months.

Making these two plans (optimistic and pessimistic) gives you an upper and lower bound of what to expect.

Finally, make sure you have some intrinsic motivation to learn your target language.

Because no matter what you do, you will be disappointed by yourself at some point during your journey.

So making sure your motivation helps you overcome these disappointments.

What are your techniques to avoid the planning fallacy?