Spurt

How many tasks to plan for a day

Fewer than feels right: about three tasks that would make the day count, chosen in the morning and done first. The rest of the list can wait or be done as extra. People tend to underestimate how long their own tasks will take, so a day planned to the brim usually ends with part of it moved to tomorrow.

Updated 29 October 2026

Why a full list rarely gets done

Roger Buehler and colleagues asked students writing a final-year thesis how long it would take them. On average the students estimated 33.9 days, and even their pessimistic estimates averaged 48.6 days. The theses took 55.5 days on average (Buehler, Griffin and Ross, 1994; figures as reported by Vijayakumar, 2017). Psychologists call this the planning fallacy.

A day’s list is open to the same error. At eight in the morning ten tasks look possible, because each one is imagined going smoothly, with no time on hold and no task that turns out to need another task first. By four in the afternoon three are done, seven move to tomorrow, and an ordinary day feels like a failure.

Why finishing a short list beats starting a long one

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer studied some 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 people at seven companies. A sense of making progress on meaningful work was the single most important factor in how people felt about their day at work. Small wins were nearly as effective as major breakthroughs, and setbacks counted for more than either: their effect was two to three times stronger (Nobel, 2011).

A list you finish is a run of small wins. A list you abandon at task four reads as a setback, even when four tasks is a good day’s work.

Estimating how long a task takes

A practical correction for the planning fallacy is to look at what happened last time instead of imagining the task going well. Think of the last tax form you filled in, or the last time you cleared a cupboard. Add the parts that never make it into an estimate, such as getting set up and waiting for a reply, and then round up.

How to choose the three

Three is a starting point. It is few enough to finish on an ordinary day and enough to make the day count; if two of your tasks are long, two is the right number. Go through these questions in order and stop when you have three.

Choose tasks you can finish today. If a job is too big for one day, today’s task is a part of it: Garage, the shelves by the door, rather than Sort out the garage. Then do the three first, before the rest of the list gets a turn. If one of them has a natural time, give it that time: the call when the office opens, the run before lunch.

In Spurt this is Plan. It opens on your first visit of a day with nothing planned yet and shows the tasks worth considering in groups (Important, Carried over, For today and Next three days), and you star up to three, or the number you set in Settings, anything from one to five. Each can take a part of the day, Morning, Midday, Afternoon or Evening. A star past your number brings up Swap one out?, and on a busy day it also offers Add a fourth today, for that day only and never past five.

A plan in two minutes

It is ten to eight. The list has 31 tasks. Due today: the school trip form. Waiting longest: the call to the bank about the card, carried for four days. Someone waiting: Sam’s question about which weekend suits for the trip. That is three, chosen in under two minutes.

When everything feels important

Some mornings five tasks all feel as if they must happen today. Rank them by what it would cost if each one slipped by a day. A missed school form costs more than a late reply to a newsletter, and a bill due tomorrow costs more than one due next week. The top three are today’s. The others are still important; they go on tomorrow’s list or get a date of their own.

If most mornings bring more than three tasks that must happen that day, the problem is the number of commitments, and no way of planning a day will fix it. Some of them need to go to someone else, and some need to be dropped.

What to do with the rest of the list

The tasks you didn’t choose are still there, and how they wait matters. Masicampo and Baumeister found that unfinished goals keep pulling at the mind, with intrusive thoughts and worse performance on unrelated work, and that making a specific plan for those goals removed the effect (Masicampo and Baumeister, 2011). Deciding when a task will happen is part of what lets you stop thinking about it.

So give each remaining task an honest place. If it is due this week, give it a day. If it has no date but you still want it, move it to a list for later. If you no longer want it, delete it. Anything left for today stays as extra, for when the three are done.

In Spurt, today’s other tasks sit under For today until you plan and under Also today once you have, and the list for later is called Someday.

When the three are done

Once the three are done, the plan for the day is done. Carry on with something extra if you want to, or stop. Adding three new priorities at two in the afternoon turns a finished day back into an unfinished one, so whatever comes after the three counts as extra.

Spurt marks the moment with Day cleared, once a day, and a task you star after that is a bonus.

Choose tomorrow’s first task tonight

A plan made the evening before removes the first decision of the morning. It needs one line: tomorrow’s first task and when you will start it. In Gollwitzer and Sheeran’s meta-analysis of 94 tests, plans in the form “when this happens, I will do that” had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006), and “When I sit down with coffee tomorrow, I’ll call the bank” is one of those plans.

When you clear the day in Spurt, Day cleared has Pick tomorrow’s first Must-Do, and the task you choose is marked First up tomorrow.

When the plan falls apart by noon

Some days change by mid-morning: a child is ill, or the car won’t start. Change the plan instead of abandoning it. Swap one task for something smaller, or move one to tomorrow.

In Spurt, a planned task you unstar or move to Someday leaves the plan, and finishing the ones that remain still clears the day.

Sources

More: Tasks you keep putting off