Estimating how long it will take to accomplish a task or a set of tasks is not easy or so it may seem at first.
With a little preparation and some careful thinking, you too can become a master of time estimation.
Let's look at an example.
Suppose you have to prepare a report for one of your business clients that involves researching five months of performance data using an online database.
Creating a set of tables and charts to display the data.
Writing some text to explain the data and present your analysis.
Preparing the final report document.
And finally, ensuring that the document arrives at the overnight delivery services' office before it closes at 5 PM.
How long will this take? And when should you start working on it?
If you've done this kind of report before and kept track of how long it took to do each part, you'll have a good starting point for an estimate.
You reviewed your log from last month and see that for a similar report that covered one month of data, it took you 1 hour to gather the data online, a half hour to create the tables and charts. 1 hour to write the explanation and analysis section, 45 minutes to assemble the final document and 15 minutes to drive to the overnight delivery service's office.
You have five months worth of data to collect this time. So you increased your data gathering estimate to 5 hours. That's 1 hour for each month of data, 2 and a half hours to prepare the tables and charts and 5 hours to write the text.
This analogous estimate totals 12 and a half hours.
Assembling the document requires adding a few extra sheets. But it shouldn't take any longer than a document covering one month.
Also, the drive to the delivery service's office will take the same amount of time regardless of the size of the report.
So we keep those time estimates the same. So now you have your total time estimate, 13 and a half hours.
Assuming you'd get about 6 hours of concentrated work done in an 8 hour period, you would need at least
two days to finish the report.
To be safe, it's good to add an extra half day.
So if the report were due on say Thursday, you would want to start working on it by Monday afternoon.