2021/03/30 by Kaley Brauer, Brauer, Kaley · 6 voices
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · #Big Data and Business Intelligence #Complex Systems and Decision Making #physics.pop-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.16574
openalex publication_date 2021/03/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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).