- Tasks of high urgency & importance twice as likely to be completed as those with low urgency & importance
- The presence of a deadline was NOT found significant. Time limit does not make individuals rate a task as urgent/important
- Tasks w/ meetings or involving others are more likely to get done

Wake Forest University

- 287 to-dos obtained from participants (68% completed in 1 week, 81% handled by final interview)
- 63% of tasks completed between 10 minutes and 4 hours
- Participants did NOT accurately predict amount of time task would take (only 25% of predictions matched amount of time actually used). Almost evenly split between over- and under- estimating amount of time needed
- 16% of tasks not completed by final interview had strong justification (Ex: didn't need to be done for several months)
- Participants found to prioritize tasks well: only 3% of tasks went uncompleted without a good reason

Study 2 Quantitative Findings (What a To-Do: Studies of Task Management Towards the Design of a Personal Task List Manager)

Bellotti, V., Dalal, B., Good, N., Flynn, P., Bobrow, D. G., & Ducheneaut, N. (2004). What a to-do: Studies of task management towards the design of a personal task list manager. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 735–742. https://doi.org/10.1145/985692.985785

What a To-Do: Studies of Task Management Towards the Design of a Personal Task List Manager 

- Task urgency not related to any one kind of reminder medium
- To-do lists used more in longer study: pos. association with importance, neg. association with being completed in a week 
--> so, more important to-dos placed on lists to avoid being overlooked
- Email, print-out, paper note, and object to-dos found to be less important on average
- NO reminder exhibited a strong, positive correlation with completion in one week (but not significantly correlated with task importance)
- No overall statistical relationship between task completion and reminder medium (except object reminders: significantly less likely to be done)

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