Three other hacks which when combined have a lot of power .. Chebyshev's Theorem: 89% of all values in (almost every human-ish) distribution fall within 3 SDs

Three other hacks which when combined have a lot of power .. Chebyshev's Theorem: 89% of all values in (almost every human-ish) distribution fall within 3 SDs of the mean. PERT estimation: base your estimates on the happiest (O for optimistic) unhappiest (P For Pessimistic), and most likely (ML) path - the recommended formula is (P + O + 4ML) / 6, but you can also just model them as a distribution. Secretary problem: when attempting to optimize a result, the effect of uncertainties can be ascertained in 1/e (~37%) of the total solution space. So putting this together .. If you have to give a time estimate for something, your best bet is to 1) get your 3 PERT numbers 2) calc the mean, SD, and 37% of mean + 3SD ("Assessment") - this is how much time it should take (based on your pessismism) to eliminate uncertainty for the remaining work estimate 3) if the mean is less than the Assessment time, there's too much uncertainty and you should offer to assess the effort instead of just doing the work 4) if the mean is more than the assessment, just offer to do the work with the PERT output from the formula above. I find most people are happy to hear you have a concrete plan for assessing something with the explicit purpose of providing precision.