How long will this take is really several questions at once. There is the doing, and there is finding everything you need before you can start, and the second one is usually missing from the guess.

If you have ten minutes and the episode is forty, the moment to act is before it starts. Stopping halfway is a much harder ask than never beginning.

When someone has missed the deadline again, the talk about how they always do this changes nothing except how they feel. If you want a different Friday, the conversation belongs on Monday, and it is about the plan rather than the person.

The inner clock does more than one job. It tells you what time it is now, how long that took, how long things usually take, and it taps you on the shoulder when a particular time arrives.