(upbeat music) - All right, next question we got from Michael. He's in operational technology, and he's got a question about estimating time to complete a task. - Hi Cal, Michael from sunny Ballarat, Australia here. I work in operational technology where the real things happen. So studies suggest we're terrible at estimating time required to complete a task, and that getting started is half the battle.

I feel like there is competing thoughts on how to deal with this. On one hand, a task will expand to the time allocated to it. So allocate a short time and just get what you can done as a forcing function. On the other hand, take your estimate of time needed to complete it and double it to make sure you don't over commit or over schedule yourself.

I'm always running out of time in a block or finishing early. How do you approach this tension? - Well, Michael, the good news is that you are time blocking. So if you're time blocking, you have a hope of actually figuring out how long things actually take. It's one of the great advantages of time blocking is that you get real time feedback.

I gave this type of work this much time on my time block plan for today, and I did not hit that time. How do I know? Because I had to build a repaired schedule next to it because I blew past that time. Most people don't get this feedback, right?

They're just like, what do I want to work on next? They kind of work on something and it takes longer than they think, and then they're scrambling at the end of the day. But they don't get that clear feedback for three weeks from now when that same thing is on their plate that they think, oh, wait, I actually need to start this a little bit earlier.

This really takes this much time. If you're not giving every minute a plan and seeing how well that plan unfolds, you're really not internalizing this feedback. So this double the time you put aside rule, that is useful when you are new to time blocking, or at least when you're new to time blocking a particular type of activity.

Yes, our instinct is we schedule not enough time. What I usually tell people if they're new to time blocking is 50% more, doubling would be a little bit more conservative, but people really underestimate at first. However, and this is the real benefit, you won't have to keep doing that forever because you will get better at these estimates.

So you put down time, when you hit it, you're happy, when you don't, you don't. You're getting reinforcement here. Do this for a few weeks, you're putting down the right amount of time. So if you're time blocking, yes, there's a place for this heuristic of just add more time than you think, but it's only when you get started.

If you're more or less hitting it just about right, then you say, okay, I know how much this takes. And then you can stick with that time. So that's what I would suggest is if you're blowing past your blocks, use a 50% rule. If that's working, then stick with it.

You're probably right about where you need to be. So you'll get better at this as you keep practicing with your blocks. All right, we're pretty technical today, Jesse. I think we had a call about process consulting. We got an operation technologist talking about time blocking. So we're sort of in the business weeds today.

Are we keeping that up with the next one? What's the next one? (upbeat music)