I think it's good to write down your guess for your own future reference in improving your own guesses, and at some point you'll be good enough to do this and n

I think it's good to write down your guess for your own future reference in improving your own guesses, and at some point you'll be good enough to do this and not get burned (as a contractor, I'm assuming). I have been doing this a while and am not good enough to avoid getting burned without building in a 3-4x buffer. Sometimes I end up finishing a project in 10% of the expected time, but at least it's not over 100%? I don't think that's very healthy for anyone involved though, it's better if for projects I can't estimate well we just do hourly so that I'm incentiviced to spend lots of time making it great and they're incentivized to give me more work in updating the spec without needing to renegotiate anything. But yeah, I'd say yes estimate and do it in writing but keep it to yourself until you're actually good at it. It takes practice, but honest logs of your past projects will elucidate over time. Like how whenever my biologist coworkers would plan an 8 hour project, 11 hours in I'm just like... how did you not plan for cleanup and prep? Some things are just not obvious right away, but can become clear in retrospectives that inform future estimates.