Improve Yourself – Accurately Estimate Tasks

Are your estimates for the duration of tasks not accurate enough? Do you spend more or even less time than you thought you would?

This is particularly unpleasant when time is limited. Accurate estimates of task needs practice. The bigger the task the less accurate your estimate usually is. Inaccurate estimates sum up and make it difficult to plan. Completion of larger work items is more difficult to predict due to a sum of inaccurate task estimates. The estimate is therefore not useful for planning.

Having experienced this in several teams, I thought of a way to test estimates and improve them. This simple exercise helped to do just this. It can be applied to any task that you are facing.

1. Before starting the task, write down an estimation of how long you think you will need to complete the task.
2. Note the time when you actually start the task.
3. After finishing, record the time again.
4. Look at the difference between your estimate and the time that you took to complete the task.

This exercise should be done regularly and progress should be tracked. As a result you will become more conscious of how accurate your estimates are and learn to improve them over time.

There is no magic in this exercise, it’s basically common sense.  However, from my experience it is just not done in daily work.