Short-term Issues; Long-term Problems
04 May 2026Thinking Through The Guesses
It seems that as I’ve continued my journey through the class, a reoccurring issue has trailing been trailing after me. That is, I have a terrible perception of time! In a long term
project, it can often be difficult to grasp at the root of an application - what does it mean to make what I am designing? As a result, my estimations were often based off of smoke and mirrors
before eventually being grounded in a more concrete awareness of how I solve problems. For example, I had a way better idea of the time I take to implement dashboard changes rather than making the dashboard myself.
Closed ended problems were easier to estimate and solve than the starting page itself. While I used intuition throughout the project, revisiting the project page only led to more accurate assessments of the time
to be taken. At the very least, I can assure myself that the estimation process had one positive to be remembered - setting aside a real day!
Making The Best Guess; Taking The First Step
Similar to my lackadaisical approach of estimating, I found myself only occasionally engaging in timekeeping best practices. Namely, I would often skip out on actual timers in favor of noting the time, and recalling it later. In general, this pratice would often leave me to have relatively unusual estimates because I had wildly inaccurate historical data to work off of. Over time, I managed to actually write the down the time or even set a timer on my phone, but this was still pretty inaccurate. In the future, I might use a professional timer app in order to hold myself accountable for my time management within long-term projects. I believe my tracking could be roughly estimated to have a margin of error of around thirty minutes. Overall, I still view this estimation process as a boon to the overall project because it was critical to recognizing the actual amount of work done to complete a given project. Importantly, there were no AI tools used in this essay or for tracking as a result of personal preference.