Episode 3: Estimating Time
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[00:00:00] Hello. Welcome to the Productivity Genius Podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Fifield, and in this episode we're gonna talk about how to become amazing at estimating time. In general, most of us are pretty bad at estimating time. Most of us underestimate how long things will take us, and then we might beat ourselves up or tell some sort of terrible story like, oh, there's never enough time, or I constantly get interrupted, or, I need to be more productive.
I can't get ahead. I'm always behind. I can never catch up. We might often get to the end of the day and think something like, I got nothing done today. I know I didn't just sit around, watch Netflix, but I made no progress on anything. But we need to be really careful about repeating thoughts like this.
The more times we tell ourselves something, the stronger our belief becomes. A belief is just a thought. You keep on thinking. We become so skilled or proficient at thinking it, that it feels completely natural and real and true. And then that's just the filter through which we live and see our lives.
So when we say, I got nothing done. We think we're [00:01:00] just stating reality, reporting the news, just telling it like it is. But our reality is created by our brain, which is constantly scanning for evidence of what it believes to be true.
Our brain can't possibly focus on everything, so it just scans for evidence to support its current beliefs. So if you currently believe you aren't productive or you don't get a lot done, we wanna begin to break that pattern thinking because it's actually not true.
Whether or not you're productive is very subjective. Like how do you even know? How do you measure that? What we wanna do is to intentionally create evidence to believe something else. One great way to do this is to become skilled at accurately estimating time. This will allow you to know exactly what you can and can't get done in a certain timeframe.
When you master this, there's no reason to be disappointed at the end of the day about the things you didn't get to do because you know ahead of time exactly what will and won't get done. Here is the process for how to accurately estimate the time for a task. First, decide what done actually looks like.
How will you know the [00:02:00] task is done? Make sure you're very clear about this. Very often we forget about all the final little details that take extra time towards the end, like maybe making a call or sending something off in an email, cleaning up, filing something, or notifying someone. Step two, list out all the steps. Now, this is absolutely the hardest part for most of us. Our brains will definitely offer thoughts like, I just need to get started. I know how to do it.
This is a waste of time. But if you don't do the step, you'll likely forget steps, and then that will lead to underestimating the time it'll take. For example, let's take recording this podcast. If I were just to kind of quickly jump in and think, ah, about how much time do I wanna give myself, I would probably think, okay, an episode of my podcast is anywhere between five and 10 minutes.
So if I have the outline already done and I'm just looking at the recording piece, I don't know, let's double that. That would give me twice as much time. I could mess up once on every single line that I record and still get it done in the time. But that would be a gross underestimate of how long it would take, because now if I [00:03:00] break that down into the actual steps to record, here are my steps.
I just did this a few moments ago. First, I fixed my hair or makeup cuz I do a video with this that takes about 10 minutes. I find a different shirt to put on, like something that looks nice, that's about five minutes. I set up and test my microphone and make sure the room is quiet, like I make sure the air isn't blowing and stuff like that.
About six minutes. Then I resize my outline so it fits next to my camera, and I adjust my camera at the right spot in the screen. Five minutes. Then I actually do the recording 20 minutes. Then I rename the name of the recording one minute, and Then I put my microphone away one minute.
, so that totals 48 minutes, way longer than 20 minutes. So step three of the process is to assign the time for each item. You can see I already did that in my list. Step four, total up the times, and step five, evaluate afterward and celebrate the things that went well and just learn from the things that didn't.
So if we look at the example of me recording my podcast, it took me about three minutes to write out those steps and assign times for each step. If I hadn't done that, then I likely would've scheduled 20 minutes to record the podcast, [00:04:00] and then it would take me more than double that time.
And then I'd likely think something like, I'm so slow, or, oh my gosh, I'm behind. I'm running late. And then I could use that as evidence to prove, once again, I'm so unproductive.
But instead, I have so many things to be proud of and to use as evidence that maybe I'm pretty good at this whole time management thing. Like one, I resisted the urge to just get going and I took the time to schedule things out.
. Also, instead of being able to cross off one item off my to-do list record podcast, I crossed off seven micro tasks. Don't underestimate the power of those little dopamine hits we get when checking things off our list. And finally I was able to finish the task in the time I allotted, making it easy to believe. Look at me, I'm getting so good at managing my time.
Okay. Don't put pressure on yourself to do this. Always. Just try it out. You'll be amazed at how accurately you can approximate time by practicing this with some regularity. This is easiest to do about 24 hours in advance since your primitive brain will be less likely [00:05:00] to be online and freaking out
When you're thinking 24 hours in advance, you're more likely to be using your prefrontal cortex and that area of your brain loves making plans. So try planning out a task when you're planning for the future, but have you ever planned on doing something and you're so excited to get it done, and then the next day or a few days later, whenever you were going to do it, you just don't feel like it anymore?
And you question, where did your motivation go? You might even feel a little defeated or disappointed or bummed that you lost all that excitement.
In the next episode, we'll look at why this is very common and what you can do to still get the thing done. But until then, I hope you have an amazing week.
