Time compression: what it is and what it means

Time compression is a cognitive bias of memory that leads you to overestimate the duration of past tasks: emotionally salient or recent activities seem longer than they were, while routine activities are compressed in memory. The mechanism is the opposite of the planning fallacy but produces the same distortion of overall perception: when you look back, you tend to believe you worked more than what was recorded, which yields an unreliable subjective snapshot of the week.

Distinctive: overestimate the duration of past tasks
Distinctive: emotionally salient
Essential: cognitive bias of memory
Constant: unreliable subjective snapshot

Glossary

Time compression

A cognitive bias of memory that leads you to overestimate how long past tasks took: emotionally salient activities seem longer, while routine ones are compressed in memory.