There's another hidden aspect: Be aware of dependencies.
When you have a series of dependencies (A -> B -> C) stacked against each other, once A is late, B and C are almost guaranteed to be late. If B is late too, C suffers even more and has little chance of being on time.
If you can lay out the tasks so that dependencies have slack between them so that lateness can be absorbed without shifting later tasks, you are more likely chance to hit deadlines and potentially complete the project on time. Or in more formal terms, track the Critical Path.
In practical terms, I would see this all the time commuting home in DC. I walked to the train to the bus to home. If I timed it perfectly, my commute was ~25 minutes. But if I couldn't cross the street in time, I'd catch a later train which made for a later bus. Or a slightly later train would be a much later bus. When those variances stacked up, it could take an hour.
You can also try to eliminate dependencies as well as track them.
This is partly why in software it's so critical to loosely couple software. If you're working on a big old ball of mud there are so many dependencies that even the smallest task ends up taking forever.
Fortunately SCRUM provides you with a block of time which you can use to decouple software independently of working on features or bugs, so this necessary work always gets done. Ha.
When you have a series of dependencies (A -> B -> C) stacked against each other, once A is late, B and C are almost guaranteed to be late. If B is late too, C suffers even more and has little chance of being on time.
If you can lay out the tasks so that dependencies have slack between them so that lateness can be absorbed without shifting later tasks, you are more likely chance to hit deadlines and potentially complete the project on time. Or in more formal terms, track the Critical Path.
In practical terms, I would see this all the time commuting home in DC. I walked to the train to the bus to home. If I timed it perfectly, my commute was ~25 minutes. But if I couldn't cross the street in time, I'd catch a later train which made for a later bus. Or a slightly later train would be a much later bus. When those variances stacked up, it could take an hour.