I was always pretty good with time management, especially when it came to estimating how long projects would take. I was so good I could estimate it down to the minute. Then I was given the mightiest time management challenge of my life, a newborn. For those of you without children, keep reading there are some good time management nuggets in here. For those who do have children, you’ll get a few laughs and may even have some insights to add.
It was comical at first, thinking 10 minutes would be enough for a baby bath when it actually took 30. My favorite was thinking one minute was enough for a diaper change, when it would take up to 10. These weren’t even the hard ones. The hard ones were estimating how long it takes to warm up a cold bottle after the baby starts crying. Then the ultimate crapshoot; how long it takes to soothe a screaming baby when nothing you do seems to help. It is almost an act of futility when it comes to estimating the total amount of time needed to coordinate all of the above mentioned when you are figuring out when to schedule a business call or meeting. The first four weeks after my daughter was born, I was literally on the verge of a nervous breakdown and thought I was a miserable failure. Slowly but surely, and through trial and error, I stared to figure things out. I wrote a few things down that seem to be working. (All of these tips can be used in the workplace too, just substitute baby-related tasks for your work-related tasks.)
Take Note
When relating this to a project, think how long a similar project has taken in the past. That might be a good way to gauge how long the project you are working on might take to complete. Since I had no prior baby experience, I had to take notes. I mean literally take notes. It is very helpful to document how long it takes to do things, whether it is a bottle feeding, a bath, or how long she naps. It helps me get a good idea of how long things might take so I can plan for things in the future.
Pieces Parts
When budgeting time for a huge project, it’s helpful to break it down into its smaller tasks. For me, my massive project was a “road trip with a 10 week-old.” Someone gave me some advise on traveling with kids. She said, “Just double the time it normally takes.” You can imagine how my head exploded when I was trying to plan how long it was going to take to get to Georgia with a wife, a newborn and two big dogs. That trip normally takes 10 hours. And twenty hours in a car with an infant sounded… well just crazy. Instead of just saying, let’s plan for 20 hours (you have no idea how much my head hurt when I thought about it), I wrote down how long things typically take and then added them in a huge guesstimate. Here is the actual list
New time guesstimates with baby:
- Feeding baby – 20 minutes x 4
- Diaper change – 10 minutes x 5
- Packing up changing station – 2 minutes x 5
- Repacking baby in car seat – 2 minutes x 5
Total: 150 minutes or about 2.5 hours
How long things used to take:
- Rest stop (people and dogs) – 10 minutes x 3
- Stopping to eat packed lunch – 45 minutes
- Holiday traffic delays – 30 minutes
- Gas fill up – 10 minutes x 2
- Travel time – 480 minutes
Total: About 10 hours
Basically we took what we knew was a normal 10-hour trip and added all of the extra moving parts to life with a baby and added 150 extra minutes and we came up with roughly 12.5 hours.
The actual trip down took 11.5. The trip back took 13 hours. That might sound like a pretty big deviation from 12.5. When you have a baby and you are estimating time…I felt like a friggin’ clairvoyant!
Summary of How to Guesstimate in 3 Easy Steps
The three biggest suggestions I can give someone who has a hard time estimating how long it might take to do something is to follow these three simple principals:
1) See if you can recollect how long it took you to do a similar task or project in the past.
2) Break down the project into its parts and estimate how long each task will take.
3) Give yourself wiggle room by making generous estimates! It ‘s human nature to think things will go according to plan…it rarely does.
I will put it out there that each day is a new time management challenge for me and sometimes I really screw up because my daughter is not always predictable. (That’s a strong family trait and if she is anything like I was, I’m in for a ride.) I have found this method is still way better than just picking a number out of thin air.
And PLEASE!!! If anyone else reading this has some time saving tips to share with a new parent like me, email them. That’s all the “time” I have to write this article – gotta run and change a diaper.
