Ahmetoglu, Yoana; (2025) Debiasing Optimistic Planning in Knowledge Work: A Human-Centered Approach. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Task planning - deciding which tasks to complete and when - is essential for productivity in academia and beyond, yet individuals often struggle to make accurate plans: those they can finish on schedule and in roughly the expected time. One contributor to this challenge is the optimistic planning bias: the tendency to misestimate how long tasks will take, which often results in missed deadlines and work stress. Despite its wide scale and impact, planning accuracy remains an underexplored design concept in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This thesis investigates how technologies can support task planning by translating psychological theories of bias mitigation into HCI interventions. The studies use a range of empirical and review methods. Study 1 examines why early career researchers struggle with planning accurately, identifying the optimistic planning bias as a key reason for inaccuracies. Study 2 builds on this by examining how a similar group of early career researchers attempted to plan more accurately during the Covid-19 lockdown, identifying strategies such as task breakdown and manual time tracking. Study 3 extends these findings by synthesising psychological literature to identify four evidence-based debiasing strategies: duration feedback, distributional data, task breakdown, and induced neutrality. These strategies overlap with, but formalise and expand on, those observed in Study 2. Study 4 evaluates 47 commercial task management tools, showing that support for these strategies is limited or inconsistent. Building on this foundation, Studies 5 and 6 focus on duration feedback, a strategy observed in practice and well supported in theory, yet still underrepresented in PTM tools. Two field interventions with postgraduate and doctoral students explore how duration feedback can be utilised to improve accuracy of plans in real-world academic settings and how accuracy-oriented planning technologies can be designed in human-centered ways. This thesis contributes to HCI by extending our understanding of planning as a lived practice shaped by optimistic bias, by bridging psychology and HCI through design-relevant constructs and by demonstrating that the impact of debiasing interventions lies in shaping the experience of planning as well as in improving accuracy.

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