During a session with a client recently we were talking about the challenges of estimating time accurately. He had a project that his team was 4 months behind on… yep, you read that correctly. It’s a major technical platform launch for their business, and as almost everyone in tech knows, EVERYTHING takes longer than you expect. But, part of the challenge was almost certainly a struggle with accurately scoping and estimating the project in the first place.
With BIG projects like this, there are so many little pieces included that the cumulative difference of underestimating each smaller portion adds up to a huge difference in the final deadline. But, it also broaches the question of how do we improve our ability to estimate how long something takes? As it happens I covered this topic in my book Inspired Action: Create More Purpose, Productivity, and Peace in Your Life.
What I’m going to share with you below is an excerpt from Chapter 26 of Inspired Action. This chapter focuses on estimating time for smaller pieces of work, but that’s the foundational skill needed to be able to scale up and scope the time needed for a much larger project.
Additionally, what most experienced project managers will tell you… add 50%. If you think that project will take you 2 weeks, then give yourself 3 weeks. Then, give it all you’ve got to finish it in two! Don’t just slack off and say “I’ve got plenty of time,” (the siren song of procrastination.) No one has ever been annoyed that something took less time or came in under budget.
If you set your expectations that it will take longer and then you get it done in less time, you will look and feel like a wizard. If however, you set expectations (yours or anyone else’s) incorrectly and take longer, that’s where the stress, frustration, and problems tend to come in. Wouldn’t you rather look and feel like a wizard?
Well, here’s the road to your next skill in wizardry ;). Take a look at this excerpt from Inspired Action, and start by improving your time estimation skills on the small stuff, then scale up from there. After all, even magicians start by vanishing coins, not buildings, right?
Chapter 26: Becoming a Better Time Estimator
During a visit to the Boston Museum of Science, some friends and I came across an interactive exercise and decided to give it a shot. The goal was to see how accurate your internal timekeeper was. You pressed a button and then, after guessing when exactly a minute had passed, you hit the button again. It was fascinating to see the varying results of the different members of our group. For some, a minute was only 37 seconds long; for others, a minute was actually 1 minute and 20 seconds.
The skill of time estimation is essential for a productive and effective lifestyle. Does that task take you 5 minutes or 15? There’s a big difference. If you’re ten minutes off on all the activities you do in a given morning, then it’s no wonder that you tend to be late to your meetings and accomplish only half of what you had planned.
Your time-estimation skills might vary by context or by task. It’s amazing how if we’re asked to do something distasteful or something we simply don’t like, our minds swell the task such that we think it will take forever. However, when you are in the middle of your favorite activities, time passes like lightning and you barely notice hours go by (a state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as flow).
How Do You Store Time?
A particularly interesting approach to shifting your perception of time is to become aware of how you mentally store your time line. If you think of this moment as somewhere between the moment of your birth and the moment of your death, then you could say that this moment appears somewhere along your time line between those two points. Just for fun, and going with whatever is your first instinct, physically or mentally point to your past. Is it behind you? In front of you? Off to your left or right? Or perhaps it’s above you? There is no right answer. It’s just a matter of awareness. Now, point to your future. Do future events create a line stretched out in front of you? Is your time line running through your body, or are you walking on it as you would on a path? Is it doing any fancy turns, twists, or corkscrews? Again there is no right answer; this is just how you tend to view and store time.
Now, let’s play with it a little. It’s your time line; you have all the power over how you perceive and store it, and you can move it wherever you want. So, grab your time line (mentally or physically), and let’s put it up like a yardstick on the wall in front of you, with your past to your left, your future to your right, and the moment of now roughly in front of you. Does that feel different? I call this method of viewing time Planning Mode because when you’re trying to feel where you are compared to where you will be, it’s much easier to judge the distance from here.
Think about the last time you tried to figure out what time to set your alarm to in order to arrive at a morning event on time. It’s likely that you backtracked your way from the event’s start time to your alarm clock’s wake-up call. If you could see that plan for your future up on a wall, might you be able to judge the time differently and with a bit more detachment and accuracy?
Similarly, you can play with moving your time line to run straight through your body either back-to-front or side-to-side. Perhaps it passes through your heart or your belly, with your past behind you and your future ahead. Does that feel different? This mode is often called “in time.” I call it Presence Mode because this way of storing time can allow you to be more fully present to what’s happening right now. It’s a great way to store your time line when you want to be present to your kids, to pay attention in a meeting, or to be fully present in bed with your lover.
Finally, if you move your time line down at your feet like a path you are walking, you are in what I call Action Mode. Walking on your path toward the future, you are aware of where you are now, what’s coming ahead, and how to be responsive to it.
The objective of all this time-line playing is to demonstrate to you that you have control. You may have tended to store time and interact with it in a particularly way, but you can move it around based on the moment and what you most need. In fact, you might explore shifting it around intentionally depending on the needs of the moment. If you’re planning out your day or a long-term project, move your time line into Planning Mode. If you’re at an important lunch with a client or co-worker, then Presence Mode might be appropriate. If you’re moving through a sequence of tasks, then Action Mode might be required.
Here’s the kicker: I can almost guarantee that if you are frequently late to things, you’re spending more time in Presence Mode than in Planning Mode. You aren’t seeing clearly how this moment relates to the path ahead, and you’re making decisions based on what’s drawing your attention in the present rather than projecting how long the next sequence of steps will take.
Strategies to Avoid Lateness
Here are some specific strategies that might help you address this common problem.
- Avoid “one more thing-itis.” This is the tendency to do just “one more thing” before heading out the door—checking your email, putting in that next load of laundry, and so on. This tendency made me late for years. I know that most of you “chronically late folks” recognize what I’m talking about, and I also know that you can become aware of when you are tacking on “one more thing.” Just stop. It’s time to go—this time with some grace and dignity, rather than in a giant rush.
- Learn to love being early. You can get a wonderful, peaceful feeling by knowing that you’ll arrive with plenty of time. No rush, no urgency, and no panic are required. As I shifted from being frequently late to often early, I discovered this sensation and almost began to crave it. The biggest hurdle for most people is the conviction that if they arrive early to an appointment, they will end up wasting time waiting around. Before the age of smartphones, avoiding this type of wasted time required more planning—people had to bring along something to read or do. You can still operate that way: for example, pack the birthday or thank-you cards you’ve wanted to write or that professional journal that you never get around to reading. A smartphone, provides a whole range of possible activities while you wait: respond to an email, check the stock market, watch a YouTube video, scroll through Facebook, schedule a doctor’s appointment. It can be perfectly productive or appropriately recuperative time!
- Expect the unexpected. Assume that something unexpected is going to happen. Traffic is the most common event in this category. Plan in buffer time for the unexpected, and then get a reward of downtime at your destination if it doesn’t happen. Living in the greater Boston area, it’s not uncommon to find traffic on the local roads as well as on the highways. I started simplifying my travel planning: my destinations take 30 minutes, 60 minutes, or 90 minutes. Most places I go frequently fit into one of these three categories, and I spend less time fussing: “Well…it only took me 20 minutes last time, so maybe I can speed there in 15? By simply blocking time conservatively in 30-, 60-, or 90-minute chunks, I often get to enjoy a pocket of downtime because I’ve arrived early, or I get to avoid stressing when traffic turns out to be heavier than usual.
Test Your Time Estimation Skills
To become better at planning your time, the key still is to learn to judge more accurately how long particular tasks will take you. The only way to accomplish this is to gather some data about your current sense of time. Here is an exercise to try:
- Grab a sheet of paper and create three columns. From left to right, label the columns Action, Estimate, and Actual
- Think through your morning routine, from waking up to arriving at work or whatever your natural end point is. In the first column, preferably in sequential order, write down each of the steps of your routine—for example, waking up, brushing your teeth, getting dressed, making and eating breakfast, and so on.
- Go down the list and take your best guess at how long each activity takes you, and write those figures in the second column. (Remember, we’re aiming for accuracy, not speed.)
- Tomorrow morning, grab your cell phone (most of them have a stopwatch function), a stopwatch, or any clock with a second hand, and actually time yourself as you do each activity listed in the first column.
This exercise will give you a sense of how accurate your internal timekeeper is. It is also interesting to see what activities and steps you forgot to write down as you go through your morning routine. Any activities that you forgot are steps that take up your time every day, but you didn’t remember to include them originally. How often does that most likely happen in your life, and how much time is therefore unaccounted for in your daily planning?
So, how far off were you on your total morning-routine time? Five minutes? Fifteen minutes? More? Were you guessing too much time or too little?
Usually, we are slightly better at estimating the duration of tasks that we do frequently, as opposed to occasional tasks such as writing a report for work or doing a particular piece of research for a new project. However, being off on our project guesses can be even more detrimental to our daily planning and, indeed, to entire company-wide projects. This is exactly why good project managers always round up the departments’ estimations of how long delivery of their segment will take. This practice is intended partially to allow for the unexpected, but largely to counteract most people’s difficulty with estimating time.
This brings up the similarly challenging element of planning for the unexpected, which we mentioned before. If you live alone, then your morning routine likely has few X factors. However, add in a spouse, roommate, or kids, and who knows what might interfere with your estimations? Whether it’s interruptions, delays, or just unforeseen steps to accomplish your goal, the universe has funny ways of making sure that you can’t be too rigid about your planning. Remember the old adage, “Wanna make God laugh? Make a plan.” While occasionally frustratingly true, adages don’t excuse you from developing good time-estimation skills. As I suggested above, learn to expect the unexpected, and plan for it in advance. Perhaps you need to add 15 to 30 minutes of buffer time to every activity.
Two of the keys to peace of mind are knowing how much you can realistically accomplish in a day and being prepared for the unexpected. A significant part of our daily stress is self-initiated: we are victims of our own impossible expectations for how much we can get done. Accurate time estimation for both frequent and infrequent tasks will guard you from this unnecessary stressor and help you end each day feeling content with what you accomplished rather than frustrated by what didn’t get done.
Next Actions
- Toy with your time line. Try moving it around into different modes before you start new activities, and just get curious. Does the activity feel different than usual? What do you notice about where your mind is focused? What mode might allow you to be maximally productive in each of your frequent activities?
- Try repeating the estimated/actual exercise for other sections of your day: getting settled in at work in the morning, wrapping up at the end of the day, getting home and making dinner, and so on. The more information you have about how long these routine activities take, the better you will understand how much actual work and rest time you really have to plan during your day. Alternatively, repeat the exercise for your morning routine for an entire workweek to see if the results vary on different days.
- When planning your task list for tomorrow, jot down next to each item an estimate of how long you think it will take. Then, while doing each task, set a timer to measure the actual duration. How good are you at estimating unusual tasks versus routine tasks?
- Try this chapter’s exercises with your partner or a friend, and discuss what you each discover about your time-estimation skills. This might reveal why one of you is frequently late and the other tends to arrive fifteen minutes early.
- Some tasks expand to fit whatever time they are allowed. Try reversing this exercise by giving yourself only the amount of time that you estimated to complete the task. Set an alarm for that time, and when it goes off, just stop. Occasionally, we allow ourselves to get off track by what I call falling down rabbit holes, and something that should have been finished an hour earlier has nudged us into a completely random other world. Watch out for rabbit holes, and find strategies to help stay more focused and get you out of them when you fall down one.
If you enjoyed this excerpt from Inspired Action: Create More Purpose, Productivity, and Peace in Your Life, then pick up a copy of the book! And, if you already have a copy and have enjoyed it, then please leave a review on Amazon!
P.S. For a visual explanation about “playing with your timeline,” you’ll want to watch this Facebook Live video… you’ll also hear a personal confession…
