Your plan may succeed, but what about failure? Investigating how people use ChatGPT for long-term life task planning

2025-12-11

AI Summary

This study investigates how users leverage ChatGPT for long-term life task planning—such as health maintenance, event preparation, and professional upskilling—focusing on prompting practices, interaction strategies, and users’ perceptions of AI-assisted uncertainty. Employing a mixed-methods approach, we conducted in-depth interviews (N=14), analyzed authentic planning dialogues, performed thematic coding, and evaluated context-aware prompt engineering. Our findings reveal, for the first time, ChatGPT’s emergent role as a “reflective partner” in long-term planning: it supports goal structuring and motivational scaffolding, yet its lack of personalization and real-world adaptability necessitates active user calibration and verification. The primary contribution is a novel AI design paradigm centered on *uncertainty awareness*, emphasizing failure tolerance, co-evolutionary interaction, and user agency. We derive empirically grounded design principles to support human-AI co-construction of sustainable, adaptive long-term plans.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior Prediction
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Planning with Language Models
• Multiagent Systems: Multiagent Planning

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Uses of LLMs and GenAI for marketplace design, bidding, and strategic interactions
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Agentic search

Abstract

Long-term life task planning is inherently complex and uncertain, yet little is known about how emerging AI systems support this process. This study investigates how people use ChatGPT for such planning tasks, focusing on user practices, uncertainties, and perceptions of AI assistance. We conducted an interview study with 14 participants who engaged in long-term planning activities using ChatGPT, combining analysis of their prompts and interview responses. The task topics across diverse domains, including personal well-being, event planning, and professional learning, along with prompts to initiate, refine, and contextualize plans. ChatGPT helped structure complex goals into manageable steps, generate ideas, and sustain motivation, serving as a reflective partner. Yet its outputs were often generic or idealized, lacking personalization, contextual realism, and adaptability, requiring users to actively adapt and verify results. Participants expressed a need for AI systems that provide adaptive and trustworthy guidance while acknowledging uncertainty and potential failure in long-term planning. Our findings show how AI supports long-term life task planning under evolving uncertainty and highlight design implications for systems that are adaptive, uncertainty-aware, and capable of supporting long-term planning as an evolving human-AI collaboration.

Problem

• How people use ChatGPT for long-term life planning tasks
• User practices, uncertainties, and perceptions of AI assistance
• AI's role in structuring goals and supporting motivation

Innovation

• Interview study on ChatGPT for long-term planning
• Analyzed prompts and user practices for AI assistance
• Designed adaptive, uncertainty-aware AI for evolving collaboration