Keeping Track of the Time
13 Dec 2025
A Couple of Hours
“C’mon Gerric, it’ll only take a couple hours.” These exact words have been spoken to me numerous times, luring me into a full day of labor doing whatever my dad decided to work on that weekend. Of course, I’m always happy to help my dad out, and helping him out on projects ends up being quality time spent together, but through the countless hours of labor, I’ve realized just how important it is to properly, and accurately, estimate the time and effort it takes to complete a task. This is especially true for tasks in software engineering.
Effort Estimation in Projects
For my final project, I used my effort estimations with a combination of looking at how complex the task seemed at first glance, and with how much previous experience I’ve had with the issue in order to guess how long it will take to complete each task. For example, if the issue was to create a navbar for the application, because the task is relatively simple, and I have a lot of experience creating navbars, I would estimate that this issue would only take me at most 30 minutes to an hour to complete. Estimating in advance provided a nice way to get a general idea of how much time and effort will be needed to complete the issue. In doing so, I could think about which issues I can tackle right now if I have a limited amount of time, vs. issues that would require more time that I should take care of when I’m not as busy. This way, I’m not blindsided by the amount of time it actually takes to solve an issue and can mentally prepare myself accordingly. Of course, estimates are still just estimates in the end, and occasionally the amount of effort required is completely different than what I thought, but having a good estimate in the first place allows me to get a general idea of what is required to move forward.
When it comes to actual effort tracking in the project, I used a combination of timers and guestimating to keep track of coding time and non-coding time with no AI tools. I think that I definitely could have been more accurate and could have taken effort tracking more seriously. In doing so, I would have been able to become better at effort estimation in the future knowing the real amount of time put into each issue. With poor effort estimation, you often underestimate how much research you need to put into finding out how something works, or debugging code, and much like helping your dad on a side project, you end up spending the entire day working on something that you thought would take only a couple hours. I think most of the time I was only 30 minutes to an hour off when it comes to the actual time I spent on my issues, but that still adds up for each issue.
Why Use Effort Estimation?
Continuous tracking with accuracy helps you get a better understanding of things that you need to improve upon, and throughout your project, gives you opportunities to grow even further. Not only does it help you organize and save time in the long run, but showing the time spent on each task allows you to see which parts of an issue gave you trouble, whether that be understanding the topic with reading documentation, or smaller issues like bug fixing. Effort estimation goes a long way, not only in software development, but can be applied everywhere in life, and can be especially helpful on those Saturday side projects with your dad, just so you know what you’re getting yourself into.