When your boss asks you how long you need to complete a task, what do you say? Do you give them the exact amount of time you think you’ll need like a good little worker? If you answered yes, then you’re most likely causing yourself more stress than you need to. How so? There are a number of reasons why you should make a realistic over-estimation of your time.

Probably the most important reason that you should do this is for the simple fact that you never know what’s going to come up between now and your deadline. Even if you THINK you have a clear schedule and/or you THINK you know exactly how much time you’ll have to work on it, the reality of it is that you don’t. Maybe an emergency will pop up and you’ll have to take a day out of your schedule, or maybe you find out that it’s going to be harder than you thought. Anyway you look at it, there’s probably a good chance that something will happen that will cause your schedule to slip. While you can’t know exactly how much time you’ll slip, if you give yourself a reasonable buffer, you won’t have to be putting in those 20 hour days just to catch up.

With that being said, how much do you pad your time? This is can get pretty complicated, and you’ll get better at it as you do more and more work for your current boss. Here are three questions you’ll want to ask yourself:

1. Does your boss dump assignments on you? - Some bosses will suddenly throw something on your plate and say “I need this tomorrow”. If this is the case for you, then you definitely need to take this into account when estimating your time.

2. Do you procrastinate with extra time? - One of the biggest problems that people have when they budget themselves extra time is that they waste it by procrastinating. If this is you, then you probably want to leave little to no extra time for yourself. Some people need to be under pressure to work, you need to identify what type of worker you are.

3. Are you running into a weekend? - If you think you’ll be done on a Friday, you probably want to push your estimate out until Monday. Why? For one, if you need a last minute piece of information, it could be really tough to get a hold of anybody on a Friday. Second, if you run into some kind of complication, it allows you to either finish up Monday morning or possibly one weekend day without missing your deadline. While working on the weekend is no fun, it’s better to put half a day in on a Saturday than go to your boss on a Friday of all days and tell them you’re going to miss your deadline.

Overall, make sure you don’t go overboard in your time padding. If you think an assignment is going to take you a week to do, don’t estimate two weeks. If you are constantly taking an unreasonable time to finish your work, you could find yourself in the unemployment line. Be realistic, and you’ll find yourself not only less stressed but with a steady streak of making all your deadlines (which is pretty nice when it comes to promotion/raise time).