Hofstadter’s Law
Douglas Hofstadter’s perspective of time can be seen everywhere, especially in project management. Hofstadter’s law is self-referential, and explains the phenomenon that it is often difficult to estimate the time that it will take to achieve a goal.
Example applications
You might be familiar with the concept that assignments can often take longer than expected. As the complexity of the activity increases it becomes even more important to acknowledge Hofstadter’s law in the planning of your activity.
Steps
Acknowledging Hofstadter’s law doesn’t necessarily help you produce a better estimate of time, but accounting for it in the planning stages of a project
Key concepts
- an overview of Hofstadter’s law
- an example application of a project that has taken longer than expected. Examples of complex engineering project that are ‘over-time and over-budget’ would do this well
- advice for the student engineer about avoiding overruns through using Hofstadter’s law
Core resources
- The Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK) is a good place to get started about project planning: http://sebokwiki.org/wiki/Planning
- The Wikipedia page has a brief introduction to the philosophical aspects of the law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law
Similar concept…
The classic project management rule-of-thumb that builds on Hofstadter’s law is that you should estimate the time it will take to complete something, and then double it. The same often goes for estimating the cost of a project.