Why You Absolutely Have to Estimate Your Work Effort and How to Do It
Estimating work effort means giving a time estimate in hours and minutes to the tasks that you will undertake.
We will show below that this is absolutely critical and show 7 major benefits of estimating your work effort as well as how to do this correctly.
1. Why You Absolutely Have to Estimate Work Effort
● Have you ever participated in a project that was more than 100% delayed?
● Have you ever worked on tasks that took three times longer than what you had thought?
● Have you ever made a daily tasklist and at the end of the day still hadn’t completed most of the tasks?
Likely you will say “yes” to most of the above. This is due to the fact that you are either not planning the time your work will take, or are grossly underestimating it.
● But why estimate work? Why can you not just do the work and once you finish it, write down the time it took?
● And why do we need to write down work time at all? Is it not better to just focus on results?
1.1. No reason not to estimate work effort
Some people say that estimating work time is a waste of time. However, the estimate of work effort will often be done implicitly anyway. For example, if you want to plan your week, you will automatically estimate your work time. So it is not an additional job.
Moreover, estimating time should only take a few minutes. Of course, if you want to be very precise and use different kinds of time estimation techniques it can take a lot of time. But if you follow our recommendation and just write down your initial rough estimate, it will literally take less than 5 seconds.
Therefore, there is no reason not to estimate your work effort, but many reasons to do so as we will see below.
1.2. Estimating costs of a project
The first reason to estimate work effort is to estimate the cost of a project, as most of the project costs generally come from the time people spent working. So the more work hours, the higher the cost of the project.
Sometimes estimating the project is required before starting to work on the project of an external client. But even if it is an internal project, estimating the total cost and thus the work effort for each task makes sense.
1.3. Prioritizing
Generally we want to prioritize those tasks that give us the highest return on investment, ROI. The ROI depends on two factors:
● How much value does a task create and
● How long does a task take?
A task that has a high value can still have a low ROI in case the time required for that task is very high. Similarly, a task that only has a low value can still have a high ROI in case the time required for that task is very low.
So we need to estimate the work effort of tasks to be able to prioritize correctly.
1.4. Less stress
Many people are suffering from work overload. They feel that they have too many things to be done and too little time to get it done.
The best strategy against this feeling is to write down all of your responsibilities and then estimate how much time it requires to complete those responsibilities. Even though in many cases you will see that you in fact don’t have enough time to get things done, at least now you know for sure that work is too much and by how much. This certainty reduces the level of stress you feel about your work overload.
1.5. Making sprints and daily task lists
When we work with the Scrum methodology or more generally when we work in focus cycles, we need to know two things:
● How much time we have available within a certain focus cycle, for example for a week or a month? and
● How long do the tasks we want to do take?
For example, if I know that I have a maximum of 40 work hours per week, I can only schedule tasks for this week that take a maximum of 40 hours. But in order to know the total time of the tasks, I need to first estimate the required work effort of each task.
Similarly, if I want to schedule the tasks for today, and I know I can only work 8 hours, I need to know how much time the tasks will take so that I do not schedule more than 8 hours.
1.6. Distribute tasks among team
Most people work within teams. In this case it is important that work gets evenly distributed among team members. To ensure that the amount of work distributed is even, we need to first estimate the amount of time each task will take.
1.7. Identify bottlenecks
Estimating the work effort for each task, will make bottlenecks more visible, by highlighting which group of tasks take the longest.
1.8. Compare to actual time
After we have estimated the work effort we will usually get the tasks completed. After this, we know how much time the task actually took to complete.
So when completing a task we know two timings of the task:
● The time we estimated and
● The time it actually took.
Thus, we are now able to compare the two. If a task or a whole project is delayed we can analyse if either:
● We estimated incorrectly or
● We took an undue amount of time for the execution of a task.
1.9. Visualize work progress
Estimating tasks helps us to visualize work progress and to see if we are likely to complete the sprint, the weekly tasklist or project deadline on time.
Specifically, estimating your work time, you will be able to analyze a burndown chart and a breakdown chart. A burndown chart visualizes how much work has been completed over the time period of a sprint as well as how much work is still remaining and how likely it is to be completed on time.
A breakdown chart breaks the total daily work into different projects so that you know what projects you or the whole team have worked on each day.
For all the above reasons it is essential that you estimate your work time before you get into the work execution.
2. How to Estimate Your Work Effort
Now that we know that we need to estimate work time, the question remains how best to do this. Follow the best advice based on our experience:
2.1. Do not use story points
Many people in the agile community are defending the use of story points. However, in case you do the time estimation in the right way there is absolutely no benefit of story points over hourly estimates. But there are many benefits of hourly estimates over story points.
You can find out more about this discussion in this article:
Should You Estimate in Hours or Story Points?
Therefore, we do not recommend using story points but instead estimate work in hours.
2.2. Do not use a calendar
Many productivity gurus recommend the use of a calendar for scheduling all your tasks.
The logic behind this is that if you don’t put your tasks into your calendar you will not find the time to do them. By scheduling with your calendar you will automatically have to put a time estimate to each task and in that way you make sure you have enough time. This is a real benefit of using a calendar. But you can obtain this benefit without scheduling a task for a precise day and time, which is why we don’t recommend using a calendar.
You can read more about this here:
Planning with a Calendar? This Advice Will Skyrocket your Productivity!
2.3. Do split tasks into goal pyramids
To estimate tasks you first have to split projects and larger tasks into small actionable tasks. This is because it is next to impossible to estimate large tasks or projects. Only after splitting the larger tasks into actionable tasks will you do the estimation of work effort.
Ideally you will be using a system in which the work effort of a subtask automatically adds up to the work effort of the tasks, which in turn automatically adds up to the work effort of the larger project.
2.4. Estimate quickly
Time estimated should not take much time. In fact, when I am estimating about 60 tasks that we will plan to complete during one week we will spend only about 3 minutes total on time estimates, which means around 3 seconds of estimating the work effort of each task.
That means time estimates are very rough, but that is OK, as you can always adjust the estimates as you get more information.
2.5. Do estimate in focus cycles
Estimation of work effort should be done in focus cycles. Focus cycles are periods of time of intense work, preceded by a working planning session and ended by a work review session.
At the beginning of a focus cycle, during the planning session, we first split projects and large tasks into smaller tasks and subtasks. Only afterwards do we estimate the work effort of the subtasks.
The longer the focus cycle the less the project will be split to tasks and the rough the estimates. For example, for a monthly sprint we might assign a project that we estimate to take 3 days without splitting it into many tasks. However, for each weekly focus cycle we will split the project into many individual tasks and subtasks and then estimate the subtasks to much greater precision.
2.6. Do have the team involved in work estimation
Time estimates can be done by the whole team together or by the individual that is executing the tasks.
We have found that in the monthly planning session when we are discussing about the larger project we want to do during the month, it works best if the whole team participates in the effort estimation. But in the weekly planning session, when we split the project into individual tasks and assign them it works best if the individual team members that will be working on the task are estimating it.
2.7. Do analyze work time in retrospecs
As we mentioned above, an important benefit of estimating time in advance is that you can compare the estimate to the actual execution time. Ensure that you take time in the sprint retrospect to do so.
In order to do the time estimation in the way described above, we were looking for a tool which would allow us the following:
● Make it very simple to split projects into tasks and tasks into subtasks.
● Easily estimate time for each task and subtask.
● Easily track work effort of completed tasks.
● Automatically calculate the overall timing for a project.
● Provide us with visual burn down and break down charts.
Such a tool did not exist. That is why we had to create Workiamo.
Workiamo is a very simple tool that is ideal for anybody that wants to be less stressed and more productive. As you are reading this, we let you access it for lifetime for free! In order to do so, you have to register at www.workiamo.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK.
