One of the things most people find really hard is estimating how long things are going to take. How often have you promised to “squeeze something in before the weekend” and find yourself writing an apologetic email the following Tuesday about how you still haven’t round to it.
The reason for this is that, unfortunately, human beings are manifestly terrible at estimating how long tasks will take.
What we are much better at (or at least less hopeless at), is estimating the relative size of tasks relative to each other. This is one of the basic principles of the Scrum project management methodology, and it’s something that is widely used for managing teams of people.
I have found it is also useful to take this approach when managing my own time.
The system works by assigning a size to each task. You can do this in a number of different ways – tasks can be small, medium, large, etc, or you can assign a points number.
My personal preference, and the approach recommended by the creators of Scrum, is to use the Fibonacci sequence: 1,2,3,5,8,13,21, etc – where each number in the sequence is the sum of the two preceding ones.
The advantage of this is that it helps overcome the natural deficiencies we humans have in telling the difference between two large tasks. It is almost impossible to estimate the difference between a 13 and 14 point task, but much easier to tell the difference between a 13 and 21 point task.
It is important to say that this will never be an exact science, but that is OK. In rating tasks as 21 that you believe are only slightly bigger than a 13, you are a) overcoming the fact that you are probably underestimating the larger task (due the reasons stated above) and b) even if you are in fact overestimating this task then you are simply giving yourself much needed contingency for all the other tasks you will inevitably underestimate.
For example, lets take the (semi-fictional) to-do list from my last post and try to assign points to the items:
Personal & Family
- Arrange my wife’s birthday – 8 points
- Make a budget – 8 points
- Make a dentist appointment – 1 point
Main job
- Create the slides for the project status update – 5 points
- Plan the strategy for the tech team next year – 13 points
- Do the database migration – 13 points
- Fix bug in customer support system – 3 points
Freelance
- Send invoices to client – 1 point
- Build the new contact page on client’s website – 3 points
Band
- Learn new songs – 8 points
- Cold call agents and ask to be put on their list for future gigs – 5 points
- Send set list for next gig – 1 point
- Record demos – 13 points
DIY
- Re-hang the bathroom door – 5 points
- Paint the baby’s room – 13 points
Lets imagine I start the week thinking I can do all these things. That’s 100 points in total. I’ve prioritised them so I focus on planning my wife’s birthday, planning next year’s strategy, and cold calling the agents. That’s a total of 26 points – looks like my capacity isn’t anything like what I thought it was!
This might seem like an extreme example but that level of unwarranted optimism is not actually that uncommon. Many projects take three or four times longer than planned, and most of us have had things on our to-do lists for years that we never seem to get round to.
After you do this for a few weeks you will likely start to see a pattern emerging in terms of the number of points you manage to get through in any one week. You can then use this average to estimate how much stuff you are really able to get done in any given week, stop over-promising, and generally live a less stressful life.
It’s as simple as that… kind of.
There is a load more that could be said about this, and I would highly recommend Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland. He goes into detail about how people really work and how this applies in project management. Essentially I’ve simply lifted the “story points” aspect of his work and tried to apply it to personal time management
Next time – avoiding distractions and procrastination.