Estimating Your Work

How important is estimating your work accurately? Very important. I've spent many a late night at work due to poor estimates. Most estimates fail because many things aren't taken into account when you make your estimate. Some common things are:

• Vacation time
• Holidays
• System Down Time
• Interruptions
• Production Support
• Emergency work
• Sick
• Co-worker on vacation
• Bugs
• Time testing
• Time documenting
• Time training
• Time hiring
• Training classes
• Hard to solve problems
• QA cycle
• Meetings
• Emails
• Co-workers needing help
• Experience of person doing the work
• Support for person doing work

When it comes down to it a lot can go wrong. So the first this is to make sure you don't leave out tasks on your plan. Also it helps to have a history of how long things take to better estimate how long new tasks will take.

In addition, if you miss deadlines you'll get a poor review and can even get fired. 

Estimating is important.

Some of the things that Time-Creator can do for you is:

• Easily track your time so you can know how long similar products have taken in the past
• Track how accurate your estimating is 
• Know percentage of time is spent dealing with non-work type issues
• Help you manage scope creep so that more functions aren't added while keeping the same deadline

Take a look at how Time-Creator can help you.

30 Second Ad - Part 2

Today I worked on the 30 second ad as it kept coming up on my to-do list. The text for the ad is:

If you're overwhelmed with too much to do, Kravatz Inc. has a new product called Time-creator. It's an Excel spreadsheet, that  helps you  reach goals, stay focused and deal with interruptions.

The software features a todo list, alarms and time tracking. This will enable you to get more done in less time.

There is no product on the market like this.

Go to our website at time-creator.com to view a demo or try the software.

We are limiting the number of free downloads we will allow,  so do it today After 9 takes here's what I came up with:

 One of the things I realize about doing this work is that you won't get it perfect and the Nike "Just Do It" slogan is very appropriate. It doesn't need to be perfect, but needs to get done. Perfection can come later.

Time Management

What is time management?  It's making the best use of your time. It's easy to tell if you're not managing your time well. You're:

• Not reaching your goals
• Rushing or late for meetings
• You don't seem to have enough time
• You're always procrastinating

If you're looking for a great book on time management I would recommend Timothy Ferriss' best seller "4 Hour Work Week."

So what's the best use of your time? First figure out what your goals are then identify the tasks to reach the goals, pick one of the goals, then start doing the tasks. Adjust and repeat.

One problem I have is "too many things to do." I've recently solved this problem with software I call Time-Creator.

One thing Time-Creator does is make it easy to track how you're spending your time. Once you have this information you could look for ways to find better use of it. For example are you spending too much time on emails or non-productive tasks?  Time-Creator will show you. The beauty of of Time-Creator is that it makes time tracking as effortless as possible. Is the new guy at work taking too much of your time? How much?  Are certain people interrupting you too much? So the first step to better managing your time is to figure out how you're spending it.

I currently have 1,616 tasks to do which would overwhelm most people but only 226 are "A" priority. So to decide what to work on I use Time-Creator to randomly select a task from my "A" list and either re-prioritize it skip it, or work on it. I'll update this with a video soon so you can see how easy it is.

You can go to http://Time-Creator.com to download the latest version. Note that the current version requires Microsoft Excel.