How long will it take?
Getting more done by better assessing your to-dos
As busy professionals with lives outside of work, we need all the tools we can get to help us get through our overloaded work to-do lists without raising our stress. So, here’s a tool I find really useful: accurately estimating how long a task will take.
I’ve only seen other time management authors say the following about this topic: Take your guess of how long a task will take and multiply it by three. Then plan that much time for it.
Yet, the problem with this commonplace piece of advice is that it underestimates our intelligence. It assumes that we will consistently—day after day—get time estimates wrong by a factor of three. It assumes that we won’t get better at determining in advance how long something will take.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the patience to be wrong about something so critical to my productivity infrastructure every single day. Also, the idea of “multiply your guess by three” seems utterly random. If I tried to apply this approach, I wouldn’t really trust in the time estimate, and this might cause me to procrastinate on the work. Will this task really take me six hours? Well, maybe not. After all, six seems arbitrarily determined.
Making truly accurate estimates, however, can be both motivating and reassuring. It’s easier to place your trust in a thoughtfully derived estimate. That trust encourages you to find the time to devote to the task, rather than imagining that you’ll have time for it at a vague point in the future. If you need to complete a quarterly report for your boss and you decide that you need two hours for it, you may realize that you can readily put in thirty minutes today and an hour and a half on Friday—even if the deadline is two weeks away and you would normally put the task off.
Further, contrary to the assumptions of the “multiply your estimate by three” familiar advice that I question above, I regularly find (based on my time tracking) that the amount of time any task actually takes me is surprisingly low. This isn’t always true for me, but it happens a lot. In other words, a task turns out to take less time than I imagine it would take.
For example, recently I needed to draft my half of a book chapter I’m co-writing with another scholar for a book that overviews theater history in a number of countries. The chapter length is quite short, and the content (theater in Russia) is very familiar to me. But I kept pushing it to the back burner while also imagining vaguely that it would take me maybe fifteen–eighteen hours to complete. Both estimating a large amount of time and procrastinating creates a paradox, yes, but I think a very common one.
Well, I wrote my contribution in under seven hours. Had I known that earlier, I probably would have gotten it done a month ahead of the deadline with little stress, as I habitually do with many tasks on my list.
The best place to start in order to get better as estimating task length is to practice time tracking. Tracking your time gives you data on how much time tasks you’ve already completed have actually taken. Look over that data occasionally. How long did that brief take you to write? How long did you spend prepping for that patient appointment or client meeting? Examining this information gives you a clearer understanding of how much time the various components of your job require, which in turn allows you to plan them into your schedule more realistically.
The second crucial step to help you better estimate the time you’ll spend on something is to take a minute to break down (mentally or on paper) the various steps of the task. If I had done this for my half book chapter I describe above, I would have thought about the required length of my contribution, the fact that I really do already know the information that needs to be distilled into that length of text, the fact that I’ll probably only need to check details in a couple of sources, and so on. And I probably would have guessed it would take around eight to ten hours, which was not too far from the truth. Figuring out this information a couple of months before the deadline would have been motivating, given that in my profession, a single piece of scholarly writing usually takes well over fifty, even one hundred or more, hours to write.
When you know how long something will take, it’s easier to get started. The task is no longer an amorphous blob in your mind, but a graspable process, or rough set of steps. It’s also easier to finish the task because you have a workable sense of your time to completion, almost as though a progress bar is running alongside the task name on your to-do list. It’s motivating.
Need to get something done? Thoughtfully estimate how long it will take you. And then see how you feel about just getting started.