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

RESUMO

Daily planning supports goal attainment and productivity, and people increasingly delegate it to digital tools. Plans are postponed, revised, and left unresolved rather than executed as intended. Understanding these changes requires following tasks from creation through later updates and recorded outcomes. We report an in-the-wild study of task planning using time-stamped logs of 24,265 tasks from 957 users of a widely used daily planner app, observed over six weeks alongside self-reported surveys. Following each task across its lifecycle, only 26.4% moved directly from creation to completion and 32.0% were abandoned; all-day and longer tasks were abandoned disproportionately, and 77.6% of timed tasks were marked complete later than intended. Latent profile analysis of 909 users indicated High Engagement (11.1%), Low Engagement (19.7%), and Passive (69.2%) profiles; active days on app distinguished the profiles and were associated with post-survey completion. These findings support evaluating planning tools across the task lifecycle.