For software engineers, deadline already become their everyday life. When we talk about the initialization of the project, we will come to the question “When is the deadline?”. When we are working on our project, we always have questions like “How much time do I have for this project?”. And when we need to bring some changes to our work, then we will have a question like “Can I make these changes before the deadline?” in mind. And when it comes the time to assess our performance, is our work always done before the deadline?
Aside from the worry, we have about deadlines, deciding the time needed for work to be done is also challenging. We can’t make the time too short or too long. If we make it too short, there is a chance that the work is not done yet when the deadline comes or there are some urgent changes for the work but the deadline has already come. When we decide on our deadline for too long time, we tend to be lazy, and somehow it will affect our performance indicator because we can’t take on another task before the work is done.
Well, then I will share with you how I decided my deadline.
1. See from Experience
The most effective tip to decide the deadline is to see how much time we need to finish it in the past. If we decide by our experience, then we can guess what will happen in the work that may be almost similar to the work and familiar with some cases that might happen. But if you don’t have any experience with the work at all, we can ask the opinion of another person who may have any experience with the case like our senior or our lead.
2. Split the Task to Smaller Task
Sometimes the goals of the project are too big and we can’t absurdly decide the deadline with that large goal. Splitting up the goals into smaller tasks will help decide what to do on a daily basis. So you can know the first day will do a task, and tomorrow another task, etc. That will make it easier to decide the deadline.
3. Seeing the Other Task
To be able to decide the deadline correctly, we need to see our other workload too. Humans can’t do two things at the same time and we need to make full of our working hours. So seeing what our other workloads are can sharpen our estimation of the deadline.
4. Make Buffer Day
In some circumstances, our work sometimes needs some changes or is not done yet. So we should make a buffer for cases like these. But we can’t make our deadline too long like we talked before.
5. Make it to Week Estimation
If it’s too hard for you to decide the deadline with day estimation, you can use week estimation. A week is relatively long but not too long like a month and not too short like a day. And we can combine this with some project management methods like a sprint, etc.
I think that’s all for me, if you want to discuss this matter further, you can contact me on LinkedIn. Thank you.
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