People often change or abandon digital plans made on smartphones
How do people plan digitally: An in-the-wild investigation of task planning through a smartphone app
Human-Computer InteractionComputers and Society
Summary
People use smartphone apps to plan daily tasks, but most plans don't go exactly as planned. The authors studied nearly 25,000 tasks from almost 1,000 users over six weeks and found only about a quarter of tasks were done as originally created. Many tasks were abandoned or completed late, especially longer or all-day tasks. Different users showed patterns of engagement with the app, which helps understand how planning tools can better support task completion over time.
What this means in practice
- •For mobile app developers: Design daily planner apps that track tasks from creation to completion to identify points where users abandon or postpone plans.
- •For productivity tool designers: Create features targeting longer or all-day tasks to reduce abandonment and late completion identified through real user task patterns.
Authors
Srija Halder, Isabella Zimmermann, Linnea Körte, Leo Mehlig, Paul Schmiedmayer, David Grüning
Abstract
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.