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).
@article{arxiv.2103.16574,
title = {"I'll Finish It This Week" And Other Lies},
author = {Kaley Brauer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.16574},
year = {2021}
}