How much does one person get done?

You have probably seen “41% of to-do items are never completed.” It comes from one company’s blog post about its own users, with no sample size or method, and the original page no longer exists. You may have seen “people complete about 20% of what they plan.” We looked hard and could not find a source; the nearest thing is the Pareto rule, which is about effort, not completion. And “10x engineers” descend from a 1968 experiment on twelve programmers designed to compare two ways of working, not to rank people. We are not printing any of those as facts. We are printing the ones below, with what each one measures.

Across many studies, intentions turn into action about half the time. That is the conclusion of a 2016 review of the intention-behavior gap. Read it carefully and the half is a proportion of people, measured on health behaviours like exercise and screening, weeks to months after the intention was formed. It is not a rate for a day’s to-do list. The closest thing to that is a company survey of two thousand professionals, self-reported, in which people finished about 53.5% of the tasks they planned each week. When people set their own deadlines, they miss them more often than not: honors students expected to finish a thesis in 33.9 days and took 55.5; 29.7% finished by their own best estimate. On everyday one-to-two-week projects, 37% to 44% finished on time.

Time tells the same story from the other side. Full-time workers in the United States put in 8.1 hours on the days they work. Vendor telemetry suggests under three of those hours are uninterrupted. One focused hour is a lot.

Habits are slow. In a real-world study, a new daily behaviour took about 66 days to feel automatic, and the spread ran from 18 days to a forecast of 254. A record measured in weeks is too short. Ours is a year.

And a consecutive-day count changes behaviour on its own. When a log highlights an intact run, people keep going; when it highlights a broken one, they stop, and the effect depends on how the log shows it, not on what they actually did. That is why the record has no consecutive-day counter. A quiet day is a day.

There is no research-grade count of how many things an average person finishes in a day. So we declare one, and we show where it comes from. Todoist sets its default daily goal at 5 completed tasks. That is a convention, not a finding, and it lives inside a consecutive-day and points system we chose not to build. We borrow the number and leave the rest. One reference day is 5 kept things; one reference week is 35. This is Reference Day v1. If we had used a plan count instead, the research above says it would be roughly twice as large; we count kept things, so we use the kept count. If the reference were four, a forty-two-thing week would read 1.5 instead of 1.2; at six, 1.0. If it changes, this page says when and why. It never moves silently.

Kept counts what you meant to do and did: a habit logged, a task done, a focus session finished, and, when you have connections or agents, a task they finished that you accepted. Meals, notes, and workouts are activity; they show on the day, not in the number. We count up to 10 habits, 12 tasks, and 6 focus sessions a day toward the number, and up to 12 things a day that others did for you, so a task split into ten is not ten and a hundred one-tap accepts are not a hundred. The grid and the day always show every one.

Your number is the last seven days of kept things divided by 35. At one or above it reads “as productive as 1.2 people.” Under one, we just show the count. Anything a connection or an agent marks done waits for you; it counts only after you accept it, and the split between you and them is always shown. A person alone tops out at 5.6; with agents, 8.0.

Every kept thing is placed on the day your device said it was, in your timezone at the moment you did it. Before September 2026 Kept did not store the moment a task was finished, so older task days are placed by the task’s last edit and marked approximate when you open them.

It is not a measure of your worth. It does not know what your work cost you. It counts what you wrote down, so a person who plans less will look smaller here than they are. The half-of-intentions figure above is measured over weeks and months, not over a single day; we cite it as the best available context and say so. It is not a comparison with Kept’s other users; we have not measured them. It is a count, not a score. Nothing here goes red, and nothing here counts down against you.