We had a pretty large storm in our area a few days ago, and our wooded yard was a disaster. There were at least 20 branches down too large for me to move by myself along with hundreds of several smaller ones. It ended up being a parody of project estimation mistakes.

The first day of cleanup, I was able to bribe some friends over to help. We spent 5 hours with a chainsaw cutting through the large branches and dragging them to a refuse pile. As the last large branch was cut up and moved, I looked around and decided that since we were mostly finished, and I would handle the rest on my own the next day. We retired inside for some homebrewed appreciation.

The next day, I went outside and began to clean up the smaller branches. The 1-2 hours of cleanup I thought it would be turned into 10-11 hours of cleanup over the next two weekends. The huge branches seemed like such an overwhelming task, that I had completely underestimated the work needed to clean up the smaller ones.

As I was dragging over yet another wheelbarrow of branches and leaves, I was laughing to myself as to what a painfully obvious and simplistic analogy this was to planning any project. If I read the story on another website, I would assume it was made up to demonstrate that point. My back says differently…