If you’re like most people, you say yes to more things than you could possibly have time for. Your appointment book is full, but when it comes to actually showing up, you discover you’re too busy to do everything you've promised.

The trouble is that you make some faulty assumptions about the future. But not to worry, so does almost everyone else.

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According to North Carolina researchers, you overcommit because you expect to have more time in the future than you do in the present.

Tomorrow becomes today, and yesterday’s "yes" becomes today’s "damn!" And then you find yourself making excuses.

Here’s the interesting part. Researchers Gal Zauberman, Ph.D., and John Lynch, Jr., found we’re more likely to expect a future surplus of time than to expect a future surplus of money. We tend to overestimate time more than money.

That’s because every day’s a little different, say the researchers.

The nature of time fools us and we forget about how things fill our days. Money, on the other hand, is more tangible, freely exchanged for something of like kind such as four quarters for a dollar bill.

“Barring some change in employment or family status, supply and demand of money are relatively constant over time, and people are aware of that,” says Zauberman and Lynch. “Compared with demands on one’s time, money needs in the future are relatively predictable from money needs today.”

We’re prone to a phenomenon known as delay discounting when it comes to our time. Depending on the resource – time is one, money another – we exhibit differing degrees of preference to receive a lower reward now, rather than a higher reward in the future. We’re more likely to think that we’ll have more time slack in the future than we do now.

“People often make commitments long in advance that they would never make if the same commitments required immediate action,” say the researchers. “That is, they discount future time investments relatively steeply.”

Why do we keep making the same misjudgments over and over again with time?

“It’s difficult to learn from feedback that time will not be more abundant in the future because of the irregular ways people spend their time,” the researchers write in the "Journal of Experimental Psychology." “Although many people may perceive themselves to be quite busy almost every day of their lives, the specific activities vary from day to day. Consequently, they do not learn from feedback that, on the whole, total demands are similar.”

The answer is because time varies day to day more than money does, and we’re just horrible at imagining future competition for our time.

We mistakenly think the activities that compete for our time today, are irrelevant to those that will compete for our time in the future because the variability in our tasks.

The future is always ideal: The fridge is stocked, the weather clear, the train runs on schedule and meetings end on time.

But today, well, stuff happens.

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