Improving your estimates - TaskBlaze

My previous posting on David Seah's Emerging Task Planner states that one of the key benefits is the ability, over time, to improve your ability to estimate the effort required for a task.

The way I do this is using a neat little tool from Brad Isaac from his AchieveIt site called TaskBlaze.

This is a simple stopwatch with start/stop functionality that integrates into Outlook to create a calendar entry with categories that you choose.

This gives you:

1. A record of the actual elapsed time taken
2. A record with codes that easily allow you to update your timesheet

This will help you measure your ability to estimate and for those of you that use EVM it gives you a way to track your SPI for a given task.