The findings suggest that the “smaller tasks trap” can lead to the completion of local sub-goals, and produce a sense of tangible progress, but impede achieving the larger more beneficial goal.

In addition, participants who chose to start with a smaller task tended to persevere with the smaller tasks throughout the experiment, and ended up with a much higher percentage of smaller tasks, compared to the participants who started with a larger task. In this case, starting with a smaller task does not appear to be the outcome of a planned strategic move aimed at increasing the total utility in the long run (e.g., by warming up and enhancing the ability to address the larger and more beneficial tasks). This relates back to previous research discussing flawed evaluations of task management, which could possibly be due to avoidance.