Stop Estimating Tasks
Why Your User Story Deserves a Forecast, but Your Tasks Just Need to Get Done
Entry 4.8 from The A-to-Z Guide to the Agile Galaxy
“When you spend more time estimating a task than doing it, you’ve turned Agile into paperwork.”
What It Is
In far too many Scrum teams, it’s still common practice to estimate not just user stories, but also the tasks underneath them.
In hours.
Sometimes half-hours.
Or worse, in some bizarre form of task points.
Why?
To “better” plan
To feed the burndown chart
To track “progress”
To make the Daily feel like a dashboard sync
But here’s the truth: tasks are not value, they are just work
And estimating every little piece of work is a distraction wrapped in false precision
What Happens If You Do It Right
You estimate at the story level, where value lives
You use tasks to organize, not control
The team stays in flow instead of entering checkbox mode
You don’t waste time debating whether testing will take 2 or 3 hours
Your Daily is about progress and blockers, not leftover minutes
A mature team understands that work varies
That tasks evolve
And that the best insights often come during the doing, not the planning
What Happens If You Don’t
You waste hours estimating work that no one will ever review
Tasks get sliced for the sake of “estimability”
Team members start choosing work by what fits their schedule, not their skills
The story becomes secondary to the list of tasks
You focus more on updating Jira than delivering value
Eventually someone says,
“We finished all the tasks, but the story isn’t done,”
and someone else mutters,
“Then why did we estimate them in the first place?”
What Happens If You Do It Wrong
You use task estimates to measure performance
You force people to fake certainty about work they haven’t started
You let the tool run the process instead of the team
You focus on predictability over purpose
You turn collaboration into compliance
Also, if you’ve ever seen someone blocked from picking up a “2-hour task” because it’s “too early in the sprint,” congratulations, you’ve witnessed Agile parody itself.
What Works Better?
Estimate stories, not tasks
Use tasks for planning, not tracking
Focus your Daily on outcomes and obstacles
Trust the team to self-organize
Let your tools support conversations, not replace them
Track value, not activity
Because a great team delivers outcomes
Not perfectly estimated sub-items
And Agile was never about stopwatch accuracy, it was about learning in motion
From the Guide:
“Estimating tasks is like trying to calculate how many footsteps it takes to go on vacation. Technically possible, completely useless.”