Original title: How do people plan digitally: An in-the-wild investigation of task planning through a smartphone app
Srija Halder, Isabella Zimmermann, Linnea Körte, Leo Mehlig +2 · September 2026
People use digital tools for daily planning to reach goals and stay productive. But plans rarely go as expected. Users often postpone, revise, or abandon them instead of finishing them as intended. To understand this, researchers tracked how people actually manage their to-do lists in everyday life. They tracked plans from creation through updates and final outcomes by analyzing app data alongside surveys. They discovered that only 26.4% of tasks went straight from creation to completion without changes. Meanwhile, users abandoned 32.0% of tasks, with all-day and longer tasks being abandoned disproportionately. When people did finish timed tasks, 77.6% were marked complete later than intended. The researchers also grouped users by their activity levels on the app.
Imagine you make a to-do list every morning. You write down 'clean the garage' and 'finish reading a chapter'. At the end of the day, you realize you never started the garage, and the chapter took twice as long as expected. The problem isn't that you wrote bad tasks — it's that the list assumed every task would be done right on time. In this paper, the researchers tracked thousands of real to-do items from start to finish. They found that most tasks don't behave the way people expect: they get postponed, stretched, or dropped entirely. The app's design matters a lot — people who open it more often actually complete more tasks, but even they face the same messy realities.
Most people use daily planners to organize their lives, but this study shows that over half of tasks are either abandoned or finished late. For anyone who makes to-do lists, this means the problem isn't laziness — it's that planning tools assume tasks behave neatly. Designers can use these findings to build apps that handle the messy reality of how people actually plan.
The study tracked behavior in a single planner app over six weeks, so findings may not generalize to other tools or longer timeframes. Users were not randomly selected, and survey responses are self-reported. The latent profiles describe observed engagement patterns but do not explain why people behave that way. No causal link is established between engagement and completion.
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How do people plan digitally: An in-the-wild investigation of task planning through a smartphone app — Srija Halder, Isabella Zimmermann, Linnea Körte et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.