Getting good at estimating time

I’ve been wanting to get better at giving accurate time estimates—how long it will take to get something done, or how long it will take to get somewhere.

As a kid, this wasn’t a problem for me. My mom would make sure we were 30 minutes early to everything. Sitting in the doctor’s office because we arrived half an hour before the appointment was a routine day. Going to school? It’s an hour before school starts, so might as well get going, my mom would say.

I was shocked when a friend’s parents gave me a ride to school. It was a 10 minute drive, and we left the house 9 minutes before school started. That stressed me out.

Because I was always early as a kid, I didn’t learn the habit of estimating how long it would take to do something, or to get somewhere, because there was always a gigantic time buffer that shielded me from having to think about it.

Fast forward to being an adult and having a busier schedule, a schedule that has more things on it than I ever get to, I’ve been underestimating time a lot. Things always take longer, and I’m always late.

Here’s a lesson from those days as a kid. I was never late because I had ample time. Even when things went wrong, I would still be on time because I had left early.

It’s not a busy schedule. It’s just an impossible one. These days, I create gaps in my schedule at work, and I add a few minutes to any prediction of when I’m going to arrive at something.

By overestimating, I’m actually on time more. I’m recalibrating my time estimates to reality, which has a tendency of getting in the way.