Always Multiply Your Estimates by π (2013)

In my head I usually do "an order of magnitude" increase to do things properly. 1h to 1d to 1w to 1M to 1Y.

Thats kind of like a multiplier of τ=2π

....that's not an order of magnitude each time

a calendar "order of magnitude". I can't think of a better term.

Perhaps “up a unit of measurement”?

“Order of magnitude” is a colloquial, imprecise term that doesn’t actually mean “exactly ten” (otherwise, people would just say “ten”).

sounds about right

In an engineering context, I would interpret it to be "roughly ten times", because that is what it means. And the same argument,that if they meant something else, would just say "three", or what have you.

In this case h-d is 8x, d-w is 5x, w-m is 4x and m-y is 12x.

This is after all just unimportant pedantic, but if clear and simple communication is the goal, it probably makes more sense to describe it as the next calendar unit up.

For interest sake, it looks like non-decimal reference values have been used https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

I would say it is a "superset timeframe".

> I would interpret it to be "roughly ten times", because that is what it means

Only if you work base-10!

This is what I was taught: double the estimate, and increase to the next unit. It was mostly as a joke, though.

The wise scheme, as has been pointed out, is to adjust predictions during a project. If the task that was initially planned to take a day is routinely taking 2 days (or 2 hours), adjust future plans accordingly.

Higher-level managers are sometimes unhappy with this scheme, while middle-level ones value the accuracy of such predictor-corrector schemes.

This gets us into a related topic of the depth of management structures, and I think the military scheme (of each person directing a roughly fixed number of persons, so the number of levels is proportional to the log of workforce size) might be worth considering.

That is beyond the point, since the OP changed the magnitude with every size. If it was 8x at each iteration, we would've had less pedantic comments here

Having quotation marks around "order of magnitude" sure didn't stop pedantic comments. I'm not sure what can.

If you're looking for precision when we're estimating, you may be in for a rough time.