00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 638 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Rob burger, author of retire before mom and dad. I encourage you to find your own journey to true financial freedom. And one way to be inspired to do that is by listening to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend Scott Mader. But to do that, you have to be willing to be open to being challenged.
00:00:32 You have to be what I would call coachable. You have to have the ability to allow disparate thoughts to come into your head. If you're closed minded and assume that everything you know is right, and that you are the expert in all things, then by definition, you are a walking example of the Dunning Kruger effect. Welcome, and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast.
00:00:59 If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true color. In the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. In today's episode about investing in yourself by stewarding your time.
00:01:27 I talk with you about the cognitive bias called the Dunning Kruger effect. I share how this affects your planning and your time management and how you view the day. And I give you some tips about what you can do about it as we talk about stewarding your time. Wouldn't it be great if you could support this podcast and do it without just taking too long,
00:01:49 it turns out you can't. All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make a purchase via Amazon and a small commission, we'll come back to support the show just that quick. If you enjoy the show, when you are ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. You know, there are a lot of ways that our brains are wired.
00:02:16 Our cognitive biases, things that we're designed are made and the way our brain works and thinks about things actually interferes with our ability to do well and succeed. And one of those biases is called the Dunning Kruger effect. Hey, Ron mentioned it on Monday's episode. And basically what this says is this effect is a bias where you wrongly overestimate your knowledge or ability in a specific area.
00:02:47 And it tends to happen because of a lack of self awareness that prevents you from accurately assessing your skills. You know, this, this idea goes back the late nineties where these psychologists, Dunning and Kruger, it's two different people. We're studying how people ascribed their own skill. And what they found out is when they did independent testing of skills and ranked people so that there were people that were above average people that were average,
00:03:18 and that were people that were below average, the people in the lowest grouping of skill ranked themselves to be above average and skill over 60% of them said that they were above average. And this idea that when we're low at a skill level, we think of ourselves as experts is a well known effect. And the truth is that having sort of confidence and having the ability to think,
00:03:49 you know, I can do this is one of those things that gets us up and going in the day. It's one of those things that causes us to, to succeed in many ways, but it also is a blind spot at times. And by the way, it can happen to you. Even if you are an expert in one field, you may have the Dunning Kruger takeover in other fields,
00:04:11 you know, have you ever noticed how on Facebook people that are one minute they're constitutional law scholars and the next minute they're epidemiologist and the next minute they're experts in national politics and the next they're experts in world politics and the next they're experts in astronomy and astrophysics and medicine and hell. The point is all of us tend to think of ourselves as experts and above average and knowledge across a wide variety of areas in less.
00:04:42 You recognize the fact that your experience and skill in one area generally do not transfer to others. You can't recognize your own competence and the level of ability and less. You can step outside of yourself and look at what you're doing objectively. And what's interesting is as you begin to learn about a topic, then when you get past a certain point, you recognize the fact of how little you actually know.
00:05:15 And so experts in an area actually have a tendency to underestimate their ability to know Dunning Kruger has kind of a double curse because it causes you to perform poorly in an area. And then it actually causes you to not recognize that you're performing poorly in an area. This has a, an effect on our planning and our day to day. Because oftentimes when we're thinking about doing things,
00:05:46 if it's something that we're doing for the first time, or we've only done once or twice, we very quickly begin to overestimate our own ability. We think that things are going to go better than they are. We think the day's going, gonna just perfectly lay itself out and everything's gonna fall into place. And we're going to have this perfect ideal day and we'll get everything on our list done,
00:06:08 and nothing will hold us back. And we don't leave any sort of room for things to go wrong. We don't leave any room for mistakes. We don't leave any room for the fact that that task that you thought was going to take you. 30 minutes is probably going to take you three to five times that if it's the first time you're doing it,
00:06:28 the truth is that this effect rares, its ugly head. When we plan our day, it rears its ugly head. When we look at our goals and think about all of the things we want to accomplish, because if we're trying to do goals in a new area for trying to plan time in a new area, one where we don't have expertise, then we generally overestimate our own ability and underestimate how long it's going to take us.
00:06:56 This is one of the reasons that one of the time management techniques they'll tell you is to estimate how long a new task is going to take you and then multiply that time by three, four or five. And that's the amount of time you actually want to allow for it. Now, again, this is true for a new task. If you're truly have become an expert in a particular task,
00:07:16 then it's much easier for you to say this is how long that's going to take. But that takes time. That takes experience that takes doing the same task over and over again, to develop that routine. When you're doing something new, doing it for the first time, you want to recognize the fact that you're going to underestimate your ability. You're going to think that you're better at something than you are.
00:07:40 That is what this effect does. Some of the things you can do, obviously you can change how you estimate time, but you also can recognize that you have to play your own devil's advocate. You have to plan against your own biases rather than blindly accepting them. Challenge your own conclusions, challenge your own thinking. Look for your blind spots by asking for other's opinions.
00:08:07 This is one of the reasons that outside accountability around time can help us manage it. Because if you feel a hundred percent confident, having someone from outside, look at it and be somebody who asks challenging questions, it makes you step back and think about it can be very, very helpful to allow you to reset and refocus and then actually put a more accurate estimation of your ability and your time into place.
00:08:36 But to do that, you have to be willing to be open to being challenged. You have to be what I would call coachable. You have to have the ability to allow disparate thoughts to come into your head. If you're closed minded and assume that everything you know is right and that you are the expert in all things, then by definition, you are a walking example of the Dunning Kruger effect,
00:09:04 and that will not allow you to succeed in using your time. Well, no matter what, thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of time,
00:09:37 be sure to sign up for our stewardship of time tips series, by going to inspired stewardship.com/time or texting four four, two, two, two time tips. And that'll get you our best tips on stewarding your time until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world.