When working within a team on a project it can be hard to know what everyone is doing at all times. That is when the practice of effort estimation becomes helpful and allows your teammates to see it. When delegating work to others it is important to leave an estimation of the time it will take to finish the issue. The reason is that everyone has different schedules and for some segments of the project some people might be busier than others. So leaving an estimation of the time needed to complete issues is really helpful. The way I estimated the work needed to finish an issue is by using past experiences (similar problems with older projects, homework assignments, etc) and the time required to complete them. If it took me a couple hours to create an add form and the testing, models and more with a previous project I would use that time with some additional time in the estimations.
In my experience even after creating accurate estimations I would still sometimes miss the estimation mark but that does not mean the estimation in the first place was useless. I believe even if you miss the estimation, it is still important to set that time as a general guideline/roadmap you are able to follow. With a time estimation it allows you to compare your progress and communicate to your team about deadlines as well. Tracking your time does not have to be complicated either you can simply just use the timer on your phone or on your computer. Whenever you’re thinking about the project and solutions, or drawing out page designs, just use the time on your phone to mark down your stop and start time.
In the future for tracking, and creating estimations of effort I would be more realistic. I would take time to analyze my schedule and the time I would use to finish an issue. I would also be honest with myself and the skills I possess currently as a coder. I feel it is easy to set a much lower time for your estimation in fear of being looked at as an incompetent or slow coder but it is better to be a little slower but code efficiently vs finishing quickly with a bunch of bugs. Perhaps I would use AI as well in the future to help come up with realistic times for my estimations as well.