Whether you’re closely engaged in a project or you’d like to predict how long your task would realistically take — knowing the exact method to estimate task duration can give you a breath of fresh air.
Yet, although the exact process of making time estimates requires a true craft, that doesn’t mean it cannot be mastered.
To help you skip a few steps to mastery, this article is about to go over the entire process of making accurate completion estimates in simple steps — from breaking down tasks to sidestepping underestimations.
Why we underestimate task time
Researchers have shown decades ago that we tend to make unrealistic plans even when our past experiences contradict our optimistic future goals.
But why do we do that?
Well, there’s something to being susceptible to the planning fallacy — a habit of underestimating the time needed to complete a task due to being overly optimistic about the future.
Naturally, being filled with optimism about our capacity to finish a task quickly in the future, we feel happier in the present moment.
Since we usually don’t even consider trading this momentary happiness with a dose of realism, we mostly rely on our time-inconsistent plans.
Ultimately, we end up chasing deadlines or rescheduling entire projects just for damage control.
4 Steps to precise task duration estimates
Even though bypassing our tendency to underestimate might seem impossible, there are several preventive measures you can take, and we’ve broken them down into 4 easy-to-follow steps.
Step #1: Look at the task from a bird’s eye view
Task duration estimates can easily turn into optimistic guesswork if we rely on our subjective perspective only.
That’s why the more data-grounded our estimates are, the more likely we are to stay within our planned time frame.
If you’ve been meticulous about tracking your time, you could review your previous data and make estimates based on the time you’ve put in before.
In case you have never tracked your time or haven’t worked on similar projects before, try reaching out to a colleague. They’ll be able to provide you with a more objective perspective — especially if they’ve been in charge of similar tasks.
If everything listed fails, move on to the next step and start from there. Just don’t forget to start your timer this time to avoid falling prey to inaccurate estimations in the future.
Step #2: Break down your task into chunks
Up next comes breaking down the task into smaller steps.
Not only would this measure help you nip the feelings of being overwhelmed in the bud, but it would also enable you to put all your steps into a to-do list.
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When you break down a large task into bite-sized chunks, you can realistically assess how long each step would take to complete — but we’ll dig more into this in the following step.
What matters now is that you have sectioned a marathon-long route into doable chunks.
Step #3: Roughly calculate the time for each step
After you’ve carefully portioned your task, now would be the time to estimate the approximate time for each to-do.
If you’re not into relying on a hunch, you could start working on your first step and track your time along the way.
Some time trackers allow you to predict the time it’ll take you to finish the entire project. Clockify , for example, lets you forecast your task completion date based on the time you tracked and even sends you alerts when you go over your estimated time. You also get a color-coded chart showing how your completed tasks stack up against your estimated completion time.
This way, you have hard data to rely on when estimating the duration of each step.
Step #4: Add more time, just in case
Since you’ll never know what could come in the way of you finishing off a task — add in some buffer time, too.
You could figure out how much more time to add by using the three-point estimation method. Think about how long it would take you to finish the project in:
Then, add the days (or hours) you’ve come up with for each scenario and divide them by three.
The difference between the time you’ve obtained from a time tracker and the number you’ve got with the three-point estimation method is your just-in-case time.
Add that one into your time estimation, too, and you’re ready to get to work.
Conclusion: Keep the data up your sleeve
Estimating the time it’ll take you to finish a task takes a couple of minutes if you have enough data to turn to.
However, even when that’s not the case — obtaining your time data along the way could still help you make the most accurate time estimates.
Just remember: take one step at a time, start your timer, and course-correct as needed.
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