helpfulmandrill

I almost never know how long a software task is going to take before I do it. More and more I'm being asked for timings, but I feel like:

(a) I'm just picking a number so big that I hope I'll be able to avoid flack for being late

(b) Actually estimating with any degree of accuracy feels like a lot of extra work that slows me down doing the actual coding.

Does anyone else out there have a good grip on this stuff? Or is everyone just throwing around numbers and hoping?