Ciro Santilli The trivial takes a few hours.
The easy takes a week.
And what seemed hard takes a few hours.
As "deadlines" approach, feature sets get cut down, then there are delays, and finally a feasible feature set is delivered some time after the deadline.
The only deadlines that can be met are those of tasks which have already been done but not announced.
This is of course Hofstadter's law.
On the other hand, as a colleague of Ciro once mentioned, it is also known that the time it takes for a task to be done expands without limits to match the deadline. And therefore, without deadlines, tasks will take forever and never get done.
And so, in a moment, perceiving this paradox, Ciro was enlightened.