I said "maybe a couple days" on a call last Tuesday. By Wednesday morning it was in a Jira ticket as "2 days." By Thursday afternoon somebody was checking in to see if we were tracking against the two day commitment.
Nobody did anything wrong. The person who wrote it down was capturing what I said. The person checking in was doing their job. I was the one who said the words. The system worked exactly as designed. The system is the problem.
Something Ive learned is that theres no such thing as a rough number in meetings today with all of the AI note takers... The moment you say a number out loud, it stops being a feeling and starts being a quote. The hedge in front of it doesnt survive the transcription. "Maybe" disappears. "Couple" gets rounded to a specific integer. "Give or take" is the first thing that hits the cutting room floor. What lands in the document is the number, naked, with no caveats and no error bars.
Everyone in the meeting heard what you heard. They heard the hedge. They watched you wave your hands. They understood, in the moment, that you werent committing. But the document doesnt remember any of that. The document just remembers the number. And the document outlives the conversation, which is where all the nuance lived.
Ive watched myself do this for years and I still get caught by it. Someone asks how long something will take. I want to be helpful. I want to seem confident. I want to keep the meeting moving. So I say a number. The number is approximately right, or at least I think it is, but I havent actually thought about it the way you would think about it if you were going to commit to it. By saying it out loud, Ive committed to it.
The fix, if theres one, is to refuse the number. Not rudely. Just clearly. "I need to look at it before I give you a real number. I can have one for you by Friday." This works about half the time. The other half, somebody in the room is going to ask you for a ballpark anyway, and youre going to give them one, and that ballpark is going to be in a slide deck by lunch.
I dont know how to stop doing it. Im writing this mostly so the next time it happens, I have something to point at.
Top comments (8)
I thought using AI would make our work faster. However, because we can do things faster with AI, we're expected to do more work. So our work isn't getting any easier at all. 😵💫
I was expecting AI to give us more free time. Instead, it feels like management saw the productivity boost and said, "Great, now do twice as much."
The technology got faster. The expectations got faster too. 😅
Ah! Twice the work is so hard! 😵
That is so true! “Just put it in AI….”
It the expectation is that it just “gets done faster” but so much gets lost in not taking the time to do it right
This hits harder than most people realize.
The issue isn't that estimates are inaccurate—it's that organizations often treat uncertainty as a temporary formatting problem. The moment a number enters a ticket, spreadsheet, or meeting notes, it gains an authority it never actually earned.
I've started responding with ranges instead of point estimates whenever possible. "2–5 days depending on what we find" isn't perfect, but it at least preserves some of the uncertainty. Even then, I've seen people quietly convert the range into the lower number because it's easier to plan around.
The real challenge is cultural. Teams say they want estimates, but what they often want is certainty. Those are very different things.
The line about "a couple days" landing in a Jira ticket as "2 days" hit way too close to home. What gets me is how AI note-takers made this worse — now there's a written record of the number with zero context, distributed to everyone before I've even hung up the call. Been using "I'll get back to you by end of day" as a buffer and it helps a bit.
I think that’s exactly it. You start a call and it’s an army of AI note takers.