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Always Multiply Your Estimates by π (2013)

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268 points behnamoh | 5 comments | 27 Sep 21 04:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.694s | source
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janto ◴[27 Sep 21 06:58 UTC] No.28667862[source]▶
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

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porb121 ◴[27 Sep 21 07:04 UTC] No.28667900[source]▶
....that's not an order of magnitude each time
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1. janto ◴[27 Sep 21 07:08 UTC] No.28667928[source]▶
a calendar "order of magnitude". I can't think of a better term.
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2. powersnail ◴[27 Sep 21 07:16 UTC] No.28667962[source]▶
Perhaps “up a unit of measurement”?
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3. janto ◴[27 Sep 21 07:22 UTC] No.28667996[source]▶
sounds about right
4. mdp2021 ◴[27 Sep 21 08:41 UTC] No.28668449[source]▶
I would say it is a "superset timeframe".
5. bluenose69 ◴[27 Sep 21 09:46 UTC] No.28668802[source]▶
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.