It takes three weeks because I will procrastinate the task until the last day. Then I will solve it in a couple of hours, unless if I get an extension and can s

It takes three weeks because I will procrastinate the task until the last day. Then I will solve it in a couple of hours, unless if I get an extension and can shuffle the task over on someone else. However- If the captain of the starship knows that replacing a part takes 5 hours, it is not unreasonable to expect it to be installed in 3 days. A starship engineer doesn't procrastinate like I do, for him, as head of engineering it takes 3 weeks because he knows there are other tasks with higher priorities. When the captain say's it takes 3 days, it is because he knows how much time it takes - this is common knowledge and they learn this in Starfleet - and most importantly he uses his right as captain to prioritize this work. this is well within the captains mandate. If there are known knowns it is easy to make an estimate, for known unknowns the captain knows estimation is difficult for unknown unknowns estimation is more similar to gambling than anything else. and for these tasks you need to gather information so that you remove unknowns in order to get into the territory of known unknown :-) projects and solutions are in separate rooms, and in-between are the estimations.