I am sitting at one my favorite weekday breakfast spots. What makes it a favorite? They set an entire pot of coffee on your table, so you do not have to ask for refills, and they have a huge menu. One can find something healthy on their menu without much effort.
As I look over the menu, debating whether to go with the healthy turkey egg white omelet or try something new, I cannot help but notice the calories next to every menu item. I then think about my last two blog posts in which I am a bit critical about managers and senior managers not being able to estimate. Perhaps, this is unfair as the calories on the menu remind me of how completely off I have been at times with my estimating.
When restaurants, including First Watch, BJ’s, and Olive Garden, that I had been going to for years, began putting calories on their menus, I was shocked to learn how completely wrong I was about the estimated number of calories in each dish. At all three restaurants there were dishes that I ordered, but did not particularly care for because I thought they were low in calories. In contrast, there are things that I love that I stayed away from because I wrongly thought they were high in calories.
If you had asked me to guess the number of calories in the BLT Benedict, I would have said over a thousand. Nothing that tastes that good could be anything less. Wrong! It is about half that at 590 calories. In contrast, I would have guessed the farmhouse skillet tacos were around 150 calories each; they are more than twice that. I could give you lots of other examples from the BJ’s and Olive Garden menus as well.
I can also give you plenty of professional examples. Years ago, my manager asked me how long it would take to go through every trade in a trading system to look for a certain set of criteria needed for a fraud investigation. I told him that it was so easy he could do it himself in a week. My estimate was based on how long it would have taken on the type of systems my previous employer used. I had never used the trading system this company used. I also did not account for the executive, who oversaw the investigation, to add to the criteria every day for a month. Thanks in part to my extreme underestimating and the nature of the work, that was one of the most stressful three months of my career.
I also recall the entertaining time early in my career, when I could not get a flight to Baton Rouge, so I planned to drive from Houston to Baton Rouge on Monday morning. No, one cannot get there in two hours. This was before the age of internet maps, and my two hour estimate was based on the estimate that the trip was 120 miles. It is more than twice that. I confused the miles from Houston to the Louisiana border with the miles from Houston to Baton Rouge. Needless to say, I was showed up awesomely late for work that day.
My latest missed estimation is the cost of my son’s books for his first semester of college. I budgeted $100 per class, so $500 in total. The books are more than $1500, so just a bit off on that. I am still not sure where I am going to pull the other $1000 from.
All of my examples of wildly wrong estimates have an underlying common denominator – a lack of experience. I have zero experience in nutrition and never looked at the amount of calories in foods until calories began showing up on menus at some of my favorite restaurants. I had never worked on the trading systems that I was providing an estimate for. I had never driven to Louisiana before my debacle of a trip estimate, and this is my first semester of having a kid in college.
In my next post, I will talk about techniques for estimating, but let’s always be mindful of two things:
- We are all going to get our estimates comically wrong from time-to-time.
- There is no trick for overcoming a lack of experience, other than gaining the experience.
Over twenty years ago when I showed up more than two hours late for my first day of work on a project in Baton Rouge, I did not have a cell phone to call my sister for emotional support. I just had my less than understanding boss mad at me, and my coworkers all teasing me about being blonde. It would have been nice to have MyBlankJob back then, so I could have found some comradery and community support. We all make mistakes and learn from our experiences. I needed to hear that, instead all I had was my know-it-all boss, who apparently never had any life experiences where he made mistakes.
What are some of your biggest “learning experiences” with estimating? How did your superiors react to your mistake? Sound off with me at Workplace Rants | My Blank Job.