I’ve always been a busy person. Throughout college, I worked multiple part-time jobs, and overloaded my credits each *quarter. I was always working on *something*. This sort of structure gave me so much in the way of time management at first. I had much less time to do things so every minute had to be carefully spent.
I feel like this is turning into another essay so I’ll stop there. One of the things I learned from that time was how long things actually took. I wasn’t calibrated with the duration of events. 2 hours could feel like 2 minutes. Deadlines a month out would descend in what felt like days. There was always so much more than you would expect.
The point I want to expound here is this: If you want to know how long something might take you, take the number you think is the unreasonable max and double it.
It’s very easy to be optimistic about how quickly something happens. Being out of step with your estimates time and time again is extremely demotivating. I noticed that arbitrary deadlines just made things worse because they were forcing, yes, but they also failed to help me understand my true skill level. I didn’t know if I was just taking a longer time because I was just poorly skilled. The reality is often a little more complex than that.
When you are less bound by structure, this issue becomes glaring. There is no constraint, you have all that time in a day. And that freedom can feel oppressive if you have no idea how long things take!!
Some things that might help:
- be concrete about what it is you’re getting done
- consider how long it will take, then add on how long it will take if you fall sick, then double that
Perfect, you should be good to go. As you do this, you will find that you are surprisingly quick on some things and surprisingly slow on others. That’s good! The point is to learn how to adjust your estimates to match up closer with your reality.
A common counterpoint to this thought appears to be Parkinson’s Law. That states that work expands to fill up the time allotted for it. I agree; that is a real issue. However, Parkinson’s law is more for understanding how unreliable our sense of time is. A simple task can eat up hours of your day because your perception is flawed.
Time expands by default without structure. There is no container to hold the task. It’s a nebulous thing in a TODO list, not a tangible thing on your calendar. Increasing your estimates is a way for people just starting out to get aligned with their sense of time to start upfront with a more accurate container. A lot of people reading this struggle with setting reasonable deadlines. They underestimate, and when they blow by their estimate, they feel unskilled and get demotivated. However, by starting with a wider container, you’re accounting for the factors that would reasonably slow you down. You build a more realistic map of your abilities and can deliver on the promises you’ve made to yourself.
If you want to eschew estimates entirely, it seems the way forward is to simply just spam the action button. The only way you’re ever gonna beat the estimate is if you’re moving too fast to think about estimates.
*UCI runs on quarter system, and not semesters