Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.
Now, there is no way to say how long some projects take, that's our principle.
It would probably take me an hour to two to write it down, get the feel of it, and that's with quite a few changes. It's not really a hard thing for me to do.
I bought a clock, but the big hand broke off of it... so I just added "ish" to every number.
The coffee will be ready in a jitney.
Law Number XXXIX: Never promise to complete any project within six months of the end of the year, in either direction.
More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
It should take you about four seconds to walk from here to the door. I'll give you two.
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period.
I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.
We took on things which people might think would take a year or two. They weren't particularly hard. What was hard was believing they weren't hard.
Women have a less accurate measure of time than men; there is a clock in Adam, none in Eve.
It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
The Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules - the first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.
A good fighter usually knows, to within a very few seconds, when a three-minute round is going to end.
You always know how many horses are in the herd. It's just a question of how long it takes to get them into the barn.
There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.
If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if an hour, I am ready now.
An expert is the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.
Unfortunately, as much as I am gullible, I also hate lying. I tend to tell the truth a lot... lying just isn't worth it. But I think I'm guilty of telling people that I'm 5 minutes away when really I'm about 45 or an hour away.
Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is currently estimated.
I think probably, the makeup artists don't really know how long it's going to take until they really work with your face and they kind of mold it and build it as they're going along.
I'm trying to remember how you tell the time by looking at the sun." -"I should leave it for a while, it's too bright to see the numbers at the moment.
