Check out Painless Software Schedules by Joel Spolsky, March 2000.

I am also terrible at estimates, and I tried his method for my latest project - it really helped.

Additionally, I track my time in a seperate sheet in Excel, breaking up my day into generic tasks - Meetings, Useful Meetings, various projects, Administrivia, Helping the New Guy, etc. So I end up with 2 views of my time - a long-term tracking of my time by day and how I tend to spend that time, and a per-project estimate of how I think I'll be spending my time in the near future.

In reply to Re: OT-ish: Estimating time to code by ChrisCantrall
in thread OT-ish: Estimating time to code by kwaping

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.