Document Note: Humans are unable to get accurate estimates of how long things will take, unless is something that can be accomplished with a cookiecutter. No one is able to estimate 4 or 6 weeks.
Appetite, how much you are willing to spend.
Stop loss. Common in gambling, how much you are willing to lose, spend. Related to sunk costs, it prevents you from taking irrational decisions.
Stick to your guns. Stick to 6 weeks, make it in 6 weeks. Dont bring other 6 weeks.
No one gets everything they want. Accept that fact and that some features will be out. You start building, and it takes longer than you thought. You got to trade concessions, you have to cut features.
It is a repeatable process that allows you to continue ship. You build a lot of stuff and make the products better. But accept that all of them left something in the table.
Nothing will clog down the momentum and motivation of a software development team like not being able to ship. You lose your capacity to ship.
If you practice beeing late you are going to be good at being late. If you practice shipping, you get good at shipping.
If you are unable to ship in time, you don’t ship whatever, you cut down scope. And if you have to cut down too much scope, you cancel projects. You dont put more hours. It is important that it is there, it keeps the system integral.
You dont want to be stuck for this one thing, you could be working in something else. It creates a very negative feedback.