"I'll Finish It This Week" And Other Lies

TL;DR

This study analyzes self-reported productivity data from a research group over nine months, revealing insights into task completion accuracy, especially for coding and writing, and examining expectation accuracy across experience levels.

Contribution

It provides empirical data on expected versus actual productivity, highlighting task-specific and experience-related differences in expectation accuracy.

Findings

Coding and writing tasks are the least accurately predicted.

Experience level does not significantly improve expectation accuracy.

Expectations improve only slightly over time.

Abstract

A small group of postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates inadvertently formed a longitudinal study contrasting expected productivity levels with actual productivity levels. Over the last nine months, our group self-reported 559 tasks, dates, and completion times -- expected and actual. Here, I show which types of tasks we are the worst at completing in the originally planned amount of time (spoiler: coding and writing tasks), whether more senior researchers have more accurate expectations (spoiler: not much), and whether our expectations improve with time (spoiler: only a little).