# We Analyzed 142 Real Goals: What People Actually Procrastinate On > Original data from 142 real goals set by 109 people: what they procrastinate on, how much time they promise, and where plans actually break down. - Author: The Dendedo Team - Published: 2026-07-14 - Canonical: https://dendedo.com/blog/what-people-actually-procrastinate-on - Publisher: Dendedo, an AI goal planner for iPhone that turns one goal into a small daily plan (https://dendedo.com) - App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6762280784 # We Analyzed 142 Real Goals: What People Actually Procrastinate On Most writing about procrastination starts from theory. This piece starts from data. Every person who joins Dendedo begins by typing the thing they keep putting off, in their own words, into a single text box. Then they tell us how much time they can give it each day, pick a deadline, and name the obstacle in their way. That gives us something rare: a dataset of real goals from real people at the exact moment they decided to stop procrastinating, not a survey about what people say they would do. We aggregated the first 142 goals set by 109 people. Everything below is fully anonymized: no names, no quotes traceable to a person, only patterns. And a small dataset comes with an honest caveat, which we cover in the methodology note at the end. Treat these as early signals from the front line, not laws of nature. Here is what the data says. ## Finding 1: money is the number one thing people procrastinate on Nearly **half of all goals (about 47%) are about money or building something that makes money**. Side hustles, apps, small businesses, revenue targets, freelancing, launching a product. Fitness and health, the category most people would guess comes first, is second at roughly one in five goals. Learning and studying, creative projects, and everything else share the rest. That surprised us, and it probably should not have. Fitness has a thousand apps, a gym on every corner, and social permission to talk about it. The money goal is the quiet one. It sits in a notes app for years. It is the project people describe with the phrase "I have been meaning to start" more than any other. It also explains something we see in the obstacle data below: the money goal is the one people least know how to start, because there is no equivalent of "just go to the gym" for "build a business." ## Finding 2: about 1 in 4 people are juggling several goals at once We manually reviewed the 40 most recent goal entries, and **9 of them (about 23%) contained more than one distinct goal typed into the single box**. Not one goal with steps. Several unrelated fronts: pass my exams, hit the gym four times a week, keep up my day job, and launch my app in two months, all in one breath. This is the ambitious procrastinator's signature. The problem is rarely a lack of desire. It is that everything feels urgent at once, so the day gets divided into slivers too thin to move anything. If that sounds familiar, the fix is not dropping your goals. It is deciding which one owns your milestones and letting the others become small daily anchors, which is exactly how we now handle multi-goal plans. ## Finding 3: people promise more time than they can possibly give When asked how many minutes per day they can commit, the **median answer was 75 minutes. Two in five people (40%) promised more than 90 minutes a day. Only 4% chose 20 minutes or less.** Read those numbers again next to this one: these are people who signed up specifically because they procrastinate. The person who has not started in months looks at a fresh plan and budgets an hour and a half of daily deep work, every day, indefinitely. This is planning done by your most motivated self for execution by your most tired self. The research on planning fallacy has been describing this pattern for decades, and our signup box confirms it in miniature. It is also why generic plans collapse: they are sized for the person who wrote them on day zero, not the person who has to live them on day nine. We wrote a whole guide on [how to make a daily plan you actually follow](/blog/how-to-make-a-daily-plan-you-actually-follow) because of this exact gap. ## Finding 4: the standard fantasy deadline is 60 days The **median self-chosen deadline was 60 days**. Two months shows up so often it is almost a default setting in people's heads: close enough to feel exciting, far enough to feel possible. There is nothing wrong with 60 days as a horizon. The problem is what people put inside it. Launch the app, get to 10k followers, lose the weight. The deadline is doing motivational work, not mathematical work. Almost **half of all goals (47%) contain a specific number**, which sounds rigorous, but a measurable target with an unexamined timeline is still a wish with digits in it. Our guide on [how to set goals](/blog/how-to-set-goals) digs into making the number and the timeline agree with each other. ## Finding 5: the first day is where plans die Two numbers from the completion side of the data, and they are the humbling ones. **Only about 24% of scheduled tasks get completed.** And **only about 1 in 5 people complete a task on their very first day.** Not week three. Day one. The day they were most motivated, most excited, and had just gone through the whole setup. Even then, four out of five people did not finish a single task. This reshaped how we build Dendedo more than any other finding. It is why day one in the app is now deliberately tiny, about twenty minutes, with a first task under five. The evidence from our own funnel says the war is won or lost at the first action, not the fiftieth. If starting is your specific wall, the mechanics in [the 5-minute rule](/blog/5-minute-rule-for-procrastination) and our piece on [task paralysis](/blog/task-paralysis-how-to-start) are built for exactly that moment. ## Finding 6: the obstacles people name, in order We grouped the free-text "what is in your way" answers into themes. Among people who named an obstacle, the ranking: 1. **Time pressure** (work, a busy schedule, family) came first. 2. **Motivation and consistency** (staying disciplined, following through, plain old procrastination) came second, close behind. 3. **"I do not know how"** (no idea where to start, no direction, missing knowledge) was third, and it clusters heavily around the money and business goals. 4. Distraction and fear were named far less than the productivity internet would predict. The honest reading: people mostly do not describe themselves as afraid or distracted. They describe themselves as busy and inconsistent. But the completion data above suggests the named obstacle and the operative obstacle are not always the same thing. Someone who promises 90 minutes a day and does not complete a first 5-minute task is not primarily short on time. The real blocker usually lives closer to the feelings we unpack in [the psychology of procrastination](/blog/psychology-of-procrastination). ## What we changed because of this data This dataset is not a spectator sport for us. Each finding maps to a product decision. - Day one plans are capped near twenty minutes because of Finding 5. - Multi-goal entries get a primary goal plus daily anchors because of Finding 2. - The AI pushes back on impossible math between the number, the deadline, and the daily minutes because of Findings 3 and 4. - Plans rebuild kindly after missed days because the data says missing days is the norm, not the exception. ## How Dendedo uses what we learned **[Dendedo](https://apps.apple.com/app/id6762280784)** exists for the person in this dataset: ambitious about the goal, unrealistic about the daily budget, gone by day two under most apps. You type the goal (or several), the AI sizes a plan to the time you actually have rather than the time you wish you had, and the first day is small enough that you end it with a win instead of a debt. Streaks, XP, and a buddy who levels up handle the part of your brain that needs the payoff today, not in 60 days. ## Methodology and honest limitations The numbers come from the first 142 goals created by 109 Dendedo users through mid-July 2026. All analysis was done on anonymized aggregates: category counts, medians, and completion rates, never individual accounts. Goal categories were assigned by keyword grouping and a manual review pass; the multi-goal share comes from manually reading the 40 most recent entries. Limitations, stated plainly: 142 goals is a small sample. Our users self-selected by downloading an anti-procrastination app, so this is not the general population. Category keyword matching is imperfect at the edges. And completion rates include our earliest users, who received larger day-one plans than the app generates today. We will rerun this analysis at a bigger sample size and publish what changed. If you cite these numbers, we would appreciate a link back to this page, and if you want the aggregate tables behind any figure, reach us through the [contact page](/contact). ## FAQ ### What do people procrastinate on the most? In our dataset of 142 real goals, money and business goals came first at about 47%: side hustles, apps, small businesses, and revenue targets. Fitness and health was second at roughly one in five goals. Learning, studying, and creative projects made up most of the rest. The money goal is also the one people most often say they do not know how to start. ### How much time do people commit to their goals per day? The median commitment in our data was 75 minutes per day, and 40% of people promised more than 90 minutes. Only 4% chose 20 minutes or less. Given that these are self-described procrastinators, these budgets are almost certainly set by a motivated signup-day self rather than the tired self who has to execute them. ### What percentage of planned tasks actually get completed? In our aggregate data, about 24% of scheduled tasks were completed, and only about 1 in 5 users completed a task on their first day. The first day, not week three, is where most plans break down, which is why we now cap day one at roughly twenty minutes with a first task under five. ### What obstacles do people say stop them from reaching goals? Time pressure was the most named obstacle, followed closely by motivation and consistency, then "I do not know where to start." Fear and distraction were named far less often. The completion data suggests the named obstacle is not always the real one: people who promise 90 minutes a day but skip a 5-minute first task are usually blocked by feelings, not calendars. ### Where does this procrastination data come from? From the first 142 goals set by 109 users of Dendedo, an AI goal planner for iPhone, through mid-July 2026. All analysis used anonymized aggregates only. It is a small, self-selected sample and we say so plainly in the methodology section; we plan to rerun the analysis at a larger sample size and publish the changes.