Upon reading the first couple of paragraphs I decided to test it on myself. I had to buy X, which is available in convenience stores (comvini, Japan). I estimat

Upon reading the first couple of paragraphs I decided to test it on myself. I had to buy X, which is available in convenience stores (comvini, Japan). I estimated it'd take 5-7 minutes, but I was very surprised when it actually took 4 minutes! To be fair, this has to do a lot more with Japan than with myself. The same test in my home country (Spain) I would have had to guess 15+-5 min during day time. Sidenote: I was very surprised about the concept of "driving for milk", which I'm assuming is a very American thing. I'm fairly realistic about software estimation which only came after a LOT of retrospection. It normally takes what I estimate, both personally and professionally. The hardest factor I've learned to include is the level of detail. For instance with my personal website [1] I gave myself a full Saturday because I knew I wanted high detail level but I had in mind the overall design. It took the Saturday +1h of a couple of improvements/bugfixes (under 10% error). With my current job I'm also under 10% error. In the past I have been bitten a LOT about my unrealistic estimations, so the only solution I had to move forward was to learn from those and so I did. So now, from the article, I know that my "quick thinking" is around 50% of the project. I force myself to think a bit more and the details trickle down. Another thing I've learned is that projects tend to fill as much time as possible (Parkinson's law [2]). So if you are told a deadline, half it! Put the half as your internal deadline, then the project will be just on time. Finally, complexities are exponential, so learn to say no to unnecessary cruft. "A small change" might seem like a 1% change for business and for you initially, but it will more likely than not grow into a 10-20% change in the end. FFS that is why the duck was added in the first place, to avoid wasting time [3]. [1] https://francisco.io https://francisco.io [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law [3] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/05/duck/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/05/duck/