Traditionally, software professionals are requested to provide minimum-maximum intervals to indicate the uncertainty of their effort estimates. In this paper we claim that the traditional request is not optimal and leads to over-optimistic views about the level of estimation uncertainty. Instead, we propose, a person different from the estimator should identify minimum and maximum values relevant for planning or bidding purposes and request that the software professionals assess how likely it is that these values are exceeded. Not only does this seem to increase realism, but it also leads to more useful uncertainty assessments. Our claims are based on the results of a previously reported experiment and field studies in two companies. The two software companies were instructed to apply the traditional, and our alternative, framing on random samples of their projects. In total, we collected information about 47 projects applying the traditional framing and 23 projects applying the alternative framing.