alt Hacker News> The person who signals that some task works and is finished is you.
That's not how it works in most big companies. You can't take arbitrarily long to finish a project. Before the project is greenlit you have to give an estimate for how long the project will take. If your estimate is too big or seems unreasonable the project dies then and there (or given to someone else). Once the project starts you're held to the estimate, and if you're taking noticeably longer than your estimate you better have a good explanation.
Nobody is saying take three years to complete a week-long task. If you could do a task in one hour, estimate and take two. If you could do it in two days, estimate and take a third day to complete it. Or better yet, estimate three days and take two and a half.
I have never seen a software development shop where estimates were treated as anything other than loose, best guesses. Very infrequently are there actually ever genuinely immutable, hard deadlines. If you are working somewhere where that's repeatedly the case—and those deadlines are regularly unrealistically tight—failure is virtually inevitable no matter what you do. So sure, fine, if you're on a death march my suggestions won't work. But in that kind of environment nothing will.