For instance, if you make sandwiches for lunch and it always takes eight minutes, you can estimate with a high degree of accuracy that your current sandwich will also take eight minutes to make.
For instance, if you’re changing tires and have changed your tires three times before with completion times of 30 minutes, 20 minutes, and 10 minutes, your total time is 60 minutes. Divided by three instances, you end up with an estimated time of 20 minutes to change your tires.
After identifying the task you wish to acquire an estimated time to completion for, ask a knowledgeable person how long they believe it will take to complete. If you do not know someone capable of providing such an estimate, consult web-based sources for an idea of how long it might take. Depending on the task you’re interested in completing, you might be able to find a reasonable estimate in books at your local library. Home repair tasks, arts and crafts projects, and recipes, for instance often list estimated times to completion based on the experience of the individual who authored the task directions.
Weighing both secondhand and personal experiences will allow you to avoid (or, at least, minimize the odds of) overestimating your own ability to accomplish a task quickly or within a given amount of time.
Avoid citing the minimum as an estimate, since it is based on only a single data point and will not be very accurate.
Citing the maximum as your estimate will give a very conservative estimate.
For instance, in a business setting, you’ll need to agree on what the deliverables will be. You’ll then need to know long it will take to complete each step on the way to finalizing each deliverable. For instance, if you know you need to create a presentation, a report, and a prototype product, you can draw up three independent estimates then add them to arrive at your most accurate estimate.
In other cases – for instance, developing a new product – you and/or your team can work on multiple aspects of the product concurrently. For example, you might be able to develop ads and marketing for the product while another team develops a plan to showcase the product at relevant industry events. The estimated time to completion in this case is simply the longer of the two time estimates.
Remember, if some people are working part-time on the task, they might not provide an accurate estimate if they switch roles. When you draft final time estimates, ask others on your team for input about whether or not the timeline in which you will complete the task seems valid. Assume that your team will only be productive 80% of the time. Be sure to factor in time for sick days, accidents, meetings, and other unforeseen problems.
Sometimes it becomes inevitable that you have to abandon the initial plan in favor of a new one. If this occurs, revisit your initial estimate to determine how to compensate for the newly-revised plan.
For instance, suppose your task is to install a new operating system on all ten computers in your office. After each installation, you’ll have another data point you can use to develop a more accurate estimate of how long it will take until the entire office has the new operating system.
Keep the data for tasks you expect to need an accurate estimate for again in the future. [15] X Research source
For instance, if you’re trying to track how long it takes you to run two miles and bike two miles, you could use a FitBit or similar fitness tracker, or an app like MobileTrack. Work-related time-tracking apps include Eon, Slips, Clockwork, and Punch. If you’re doing a more manual task, you could bust out a pen and pad of paper. Write each task you’re trying to get a more accurate estimate for in one column and the time it took to complete the task next to it. For instance, if you’re trying to get a more accurate estimate for how long it takes you to get out of the house each day, you might write a list that reads, “Get dressed – 4 minutes; Brush teeth – 3 minutes; Eat breakfast – 10 minutes,” and so on. Repeat daily, and average the task totals at the end of each day.
If you wish, you could follow up with a more pessimistic estimate by saying something like “I am 100% certain I could finish this in two weeks. ” Communicating your level of confidence in your estimate is especially important if you are developing a task completion estimate for someone else.
