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Books

How Big Things Get Done

Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner

Recommended by 2 people on the record.

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 7d is days, 4yr is years.

Miles Brundage recommends it
I use this term in order to nod toward “megaprojects” (which are a fascinating field of study in their own right – read How Big Things Get Done by Flyvbjerg and Gardner for an excellent introduction).

on milesbrundage.substack.com · 9 Sep 2025

Don Norman loved it
After I discovered this book, I wrote to Flyvbjerg saying that I wished I had read his book before writing mine because it would have made mine better

on jnd.org · 26 Mar 2023

This book on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.