1. A method comprising: receiving a set of task statistics corresponding to task execution within a MapReduce job; estimating a completion time for a set of tasks to be executed to provide an estimated completion time; calculating a soft decision point based on a convergence of a workload distribution corresponding to a set of executed tasks; calculating a hard decision point based on the estimated completion time for the set of tasks to be executed; determining a selected decision point based on the soft decision point and the hard decision point; and scheduling upcoming tasks for execution based on the selected decision point.