I have, for a long time, been very opposed to single point estimates, especially when those estimates are going to be interpreted like this. For any task that has any kind of uncertainty to it, there’s a range of time for how long it’s going to take. If you take longer than your single point estimate, you’re going to be punished for it in some way (work late, etc). If you take less time than your single point estimate, you’re going to be... punished for it?
What I’ve settled on in my consultancy work is doing 3-point PERT-style estimates. If I finish a task earlier than the range that drops out, I make a mental note to be more optimistic in the future on that project. If I’m nearing the far end of the range, I take pause and reassess what happened. Did the scope of the task blow up? Did I miss something up front? Is there too much technical debt in this project?
When you use SPEs, there’s no way to tell retrospectively (except in extreme cases) whether an estimate was actually good and the completion time was within an expected statistical variation, or if the estimate was bad and some part of the estimation process needs to be tuned.