Remaining days of effort

Remaining Days of Effort

Ranged estimates are given in remaining days of effort. The low and high values should represent a span of time in which you’re about 80% confident your task is going to complete.

There are a couple places these values can be entered. In the work detail pane:

And from your dashboard:

Note that the remaining days of work is very different from “number of days until this task will be worked on.”

Say you have a task you expect to happen in two weeks. The remaining amount of effort (also, in this case, the total amount of effort) is 2-4 days. Rather than scheduling the task as a 12 to 14 day task (2-4 days plus two working weeks), set a delay until on the task until it should begin and enter the appropriate values for remaining days of effort.

Remaining days of effort is also a little different than task duration, since remaining days, what we schedule for, is based on the work that is left to do. For this example, consider that we had a two week task and have 2-4 days remaining. Again, enter 2-4 for the remaining days of work, not 12-14 for the total work days. We are only concerned with what’s left to do. In some cases, that may be the entire effort to complete the task, but not always.