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

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2103.16574
• Publication Date: 2021-01-01
• Authors: Brauer, Kaley
• Keywords: 0209 industrial biotechnology; FOS: Physical sciences; 02 engineering and technology; Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph); Physics - Popular Physics

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).<br/>7 pages, 5 figures<br/>