For a lot of these, rather than trying to estimate the thing you&#x27;re asked to estimate, you need to either estimate how long it&#x27;ll take you to do the analysis you need in order to come up with an estimate, or you need to provide a time-limit on the task after which you&#x27;ll provide a status update and have a discussion about the next step.<p>Managers don&#x27;t really care about time, they care about budgets and risks. In your debugging example, the existence of the bug is a big unknown risk, and your manager needs to manage that. You obviously can&#x27;t tell how long it&#x27;ll take to fix the bug, but you can say &quot;Give me an hour to debug it, and after that I should have a better idea of what the cause is and how long it&#x27;ll take to fix. I might even have it fixed already by that point.&quot; That gives your manager a budget (one hour) and risk control (more information in a fixed time), and the option after a small investment to bring someone else in to assist.