Strangely enough, it rarely takes me longer than planned to travel somewhere. Even before the era of travel planners, I always managed to estimate a good ratio between distance and average speed, allowing for traffic. When I was in the army, we worked with routing/timing tables during manouvers. Has to bring back some memories for you too, Steve 🙂 Those figures must have come from years of experience. I made it good practice to make notice of my experiences in travelling for future reference.

In project planning, I find that it helps to make for good planning when calculating back from a deadline, hard deadlines giving better results than soft ones. It forces you to really carefully analyze all the different tasks that need to be completed for the result as well as prioritizing and sorting them. It will soon tell you how much time you have for the different stages and as such, it helps the people you're working with estimating up front if they can handle things in the amount of time given.