This probably doesn’t help your specific situation, but best practice for estimation in software projects is to use “ideal/naive” estimates and then use a velocity multiplier. What that means is, take everybody’s estimates and then multiply them by a team-wide constant factor to allow for the fact that there are interruptions, meetings, unexpected problems, etc. This is usually a 2-4x multiplier, and can be treated as a thing to optimize at the team level (i.e., figuring out what things increase or decrease the multiplier for the team as a whole).
Of course, if that’s what the team is explicitly doing, then you know to go ahead and give your naive estimate anyway and let the manager worry about the multiplier. But a lot of organizations don’t do this explicitly, because the manager is just doing it in the back of their head and maybe not even acknowledging it to themselves because they think that if they do, it means everybody will act like they have more time. In essence, you may be being judged for defecting from the implicit norm of giving naive estimates for this process.
This probably doesn’t help your specific situation, but best practice for estimation in software projects is to use “ideal/naive” estimates and then use a velocity multiplier. What that means is, take everybody’s estimates and then multiply them by a team-wide constant factor to allow for the fact that there are interruptions, meetings, unexpected problems, etc. This is usually a 2-4x multiplier, and can be treated as a thing to optimize at the team level (i.e., figuring out what things increase or decrease the multiplier for the team as a whole).
Of course, if that’s what the team is explicitly doing, then you know to go ahead and give your naive estimate anyway and let the manager worry about the multiplier. But a lot of organizations don’t do this explicitly, because the manager is just doing it in the back of their head and maybe not even acknowledging it to themselves because they think that if they do, it means everybody will act like they have more time. In essence, you may be being judged for defecting from the implicit norm of giving naive estimates for this process.