Effort All Laid Out
12 Dec 2025
My Effort Estimate Creation Process
When coming up with my estimates prior to beginning my issues, I called back on my experiences in class when we were building websites. I would recall how long it might take to put together a create, edit or list page based on the amount of time it took me during a practice WOD. I noticed that I often underestimated how long an issue would take, usually needing two to three times more time than I initially expected. Over time, by the third milestone, I noticed which type of tasks would take a greater or smaller amount of effort. So, by that point, I also used my own deductive reasoning to make my estimates based on my experience working on the project itself.
Even though my estimates were often off, there were some benefits that I saw from this. Thinking about how long an issue would take me to complete required me to pinpoint specific tasks that I would need to do along the way. This approach helped me outline my plan before starting, which made it easier to gauge how much time I should set aside during the week to work on the issue and how early I should begin.
Tracking my Progress
I found that tracking how much time I spent on an issue was actually fun for me. I enjoyed knowing how long it took to complete tasks that I worked hard on and how quickly I was able to finish tasks that I assumed might take me longer. In terms of usefulness, I was able to get a general idea of how long certain tasks would take me after the first round of making effort estimates. By the second round, my estimates were a bit more accurate, and as a group we could all tell whether we needed to take on more or fewer tasks based on how much effort we expected each issue to require.
When I spend time working on a task, I typically don’t jump around working on multiple tasks at once, so my tracking method for this project was based on that. When I sat down to work on a specific issue for our website, I started a timer and recorded how much time went by in that session. Since there were times when I forgot to set my timer and just estimated how much time I worked, there is some level of error in my progress tracking. I did not use AI to track my progress or for estimates.
Reflection
In the future, for each issue, I would want to lay out sub-issues more explicitly to help break up the amount of work for larger tasks. At times it was hard to track my effort because the issues were so large, and completing such daunting tasks often felt overwhelming. Next time I would also try to make sure I set a reminder to time my progress each time so that my data could be more accurate.