How do people plan digitally: An in-the-wild investigation of task planning through a smartphone app

Traditional models of productivity assume a simple 'plan-and-execute' workflow: a user creates a task, sets a time, and marks it complete. However, this study challenges that view by analyzing 24,265 tasks from 957 users of a popular daily planner app. By tracking tasks across their entire lifecycle—from creation through potential rescheduling to final outcome—the researchers reveal that planning is a dynamic, often messy process of constant renegotiation rather than a linear execution of intentions.

The data show that the 'plan-and-execute' model is the exception rather than the rule. Only about a quarter of tasks move directly from creation to completion. A significant portion (32%) are simply abandoned, and for those that are completed, the timing is rarely precise; nearly 78% of timed tasks are finished later than the user originally intended. Interestingly, tasks scheduled for a specific time are significantly more likely to be completed than 'all-day' tasks, suggesting that temporal specificity acts as a form of self-nudging.

The researchers identified three distinct user profiles based on how people interact with the app:

• Highly Engaged (11.1%): These users create many tasks and, crucially, return to the app consistently across many days. They report higher goal attainment and satisfaction.
• Low Engagement (19.7%): These users exhibit a clear intention-behavior gap, creating tasks but failing to complete them, suggesting a struggle with self-regulation.
• Passive Users (69.2%): The largest group, characterized by sporadic app use and a tendency to set up recurring tasks that they rarely follow through on.

These findings suggest that current productivity tools may be over-optimizing for the 'creation' phase while neglecting the 'lifecycle' phase. If a tool is designed only as a ledger of intentions, it fails to support the user during the critical moments of rescheduling and potential abandonment. The study highlights that 'active days'—the consistency of returning to the app—is a better predictor of long-term planning success than the sheer volume of tasks created. Future tool design should focus on providing execution-oriented scaffolding for users who struggle to follow through on their plans.