Why raw estimates are almost always wrong
Ask a developer how long a task will take and you’ll usually get an honest answer about the coding itself — and nothing about the code review, the debugging, the meeting that interrupts the afternoon, or the context switch back into the task the next day. None of that is dishonesty; it’s just that “how long will this take” and “how long will the typing take” are different questions, and most estimates only answer the second one.
The fix isn’t trying harder to guess correctly. It’s adding a deliberate, visible buffer on top of the honest number, instead of quietly rounding up at the end and hoping nobody asks why.
Keep the honest number and the client-facing number separate
In TimeMagic, a project’s Estimations tab is where this split lives. An estimation has a name, a description, a set of tasks, and a start/end date for the period it covers. The project also carries its own coefficients, which get applied to each task’s raw estimate to produce an estimation with coefficients — the padded, client-facing number.
That separation matters: the raw per-task estimate stays the number you’d defend to another engineer, while the coefficient is where risk, review time, and uncertainty get accounted for explicitly, instead of blended invisibly into a single “gut feeling” figure.
| Raw estimate | Coefficient | Estimation with coefficients | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Example task | 4h | ×1.3 | 5.2h |
Turn the total into deadlines, not just a number
A single padded total is still just a number sitting in a document. The Calculate roadmap button on an estimation spreads each task’s deadline across working days — Monday through Friday — inside the estimation’s period, using the task’s estimation with coefficients and the project’s daily working-hour setting.
If the project is tagged with a country, the roadmap also respects that country’s business calendar, so weekends and public holidays aren’t silently counted as working time. You can still click individual calendar days on and off manually for one-off exceptions. The result is a set of real per-task deadlines, visible on the task pages themselves — not a lump total nobody can act on.
Hand the client something they can actually read
An estimation has a public link: title, description, the project’s coefficients, time and money totals, and every task with its deadline, raw estimate, estimation with coefficients, sum, and description. It can also be printed or saved as a PDF straight from the browser (Ctrl+P / Cmd+P), in TimeMagic’s own layout, with task descriptions printed in full rather than the truncated versions shown on screen. That’s a document you can attach to an email or a contract, instead of screenshotting a spreadsheet.
Measuring the “actual” side after the work happens
The comparison only works if the actual work gets logged against the same tasks the estimate was built from — not a separate timesheet that needs reconciling later. Once the work is done (or at any checkpoint along the way), build a Report over the same project and date range, narrowed with Included Tasks or Excluded Tasks to match the scope you originally estimated.
The report table shows, per task, the time actually logged, the original estimation with coefficients, and — if the project has an hourly rate — the sum, plus a combined estimation-with-coefficients total across the included tasks. That’s the actual number sitting right next to the number you quoted, with no manual reconciliation step in between.
Reading the gap honestly
A gap between estimate and actual isn’t automatically a problem to fix with a bigger multiplier. Two different situations look the same at the total level but need different responses:
- If actual time consistently comes in under the estimation with coefficients, the buffer is probably too generous for that kind of task — worth trimming next time.
- If actual time consistently comes in over, check which tasks blew their deadline before touching the coefficient. The roadmap’s per-task deadlines make this easy to see after the fact. A systematically underestimated task type is a raw-estimate problem; a project-wide miss after one unusually chaotic week is a coefficient problem. Raising the coefficient fixes the second case and does nothing for the first.
A minimal workflow
- List the real tasks and give each one an honest raw estimate.
- Build an Estimation for the period; let the project’s coefficients produce the client-facing number.
- Calculate the roadmap, so deadlines exist before anyone starts working against them.
- Share the public link — or the printed PDF — with the client up front.
- Log time against the same tasks as the work happens.
- Build a Report over the same scope once the work is done, and compare its totals to the original estimation with coefficients.
- Adjust the coefficient for next time based on what the gap actually shows — not on a feeling that “estimates are always wrong anyway.”
