I said "maybe a couple days" on a call last Tuesday. By Wednesday morning it was in a Jira ticket as "2 days." By Thursday afternoon somebody was checking in to see if we were tracking against the two day commitment.
Nobody did anything wrong. The person who wrote it down was capturing what I said. The person checking in was doing their job. I was the one who said the words. The system worked exactly as designed. The system is the problem.
Something Ive learned is that theres no such thing as a rough number in meetings today with all of the AI note takers... The moment you say a number out loud, it stops being a feeling and starts being a quote. The hedge in front of it doesnt survive the transcription. "Maybe" disappears. "Couple" gets rounded to a specific integer. "Give or take" is the first thing that hits the cutting room floor. What lands in the document is the number, naked, with no caveats and no error bars.
Everyone in the meeting heard what you heard. They heard the hedge. They watched you wave your hands. They understood, in the moment, that you werent committing. But the document doesnt remember any of that. The document just remembers the number. And the document outlives the conversation, which is where all the nuance lived.
Ive watched myself do this for years and I still get caught by it. Someone asks how long something will take. I want to be helpful. I want to seem confident. I want to keep the meeting moving. So I say a number. The number is approximately right, or at least I think it is, but I havent actually thought about it the way you would think about it if you were going to commit to it. By saying it out loud, Ive committed to it.
The fix, if theres one, is to refuse the number. Not rudely. Just clearly. "I need to look at it before I give you a real number. I can have one for you by Friday." This works about half the time. The other half, somebody in the room is going to ask you for a ballpark anyway, and youre going to give them one, and that ballpark is going to be in a slide deck by lunch.
I dont know how to stop doing it. Im writing this mostly so the next time it happens, I have something to point at.
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