> The day to day tasks change... day to day. There aren't a "number of tasks remaining in the queue," since whatever I'm doing is what I'm doing. What you are

> The day to day tasks change... day to day. There aren't a "number of tasks remaining in the queue," since whatever I'm doing is what I'm doing. What you are describing is not ambiguity, it's total variability. If your future is 100% random, it is, by definition, impossible to predict. Such a state would also mean a total absence of direction/vision. Predicting dates is not only impossible but not a question you can ask, since you don't know what's next. What I'm going to challenge is that you're effectively in such a case, because I don't think it's true. > One could say this is poor planning. [...] in other words, it's not possible to discover or plan what you need to do next, until you've finished currently. [...] because we didn't discover that we could do that until yesterday during our biweekly sync call. The example you're giving *is* poor planning. You're going into execution without validating base assumptions. That you discover the specifics of a dependency that late into the game is that you're going into it without a plan. I'm not judging, in your case maybe no-one is asking for any sort of accountability, and just executing is the best recourse with the lower overhead. But the fact that you can't estimate isn't due to the environment, it's due to the fact that you don't have a plan. Some of the companies I worked with are fine with that, most are not.