doi.eso.org

• Stoehr, Felix [European Southern Observatory (ESO)]

When having to deliver work to a fixed deadline people often wait until the very last minute, in part, because they procrastinate. While procrastination has been studied extensively in the psychology literature, few direct measures of human behaviour leading up to a deadline exist. Here we use metadata from the ALMA proposal submission process over the last five years and find that collective human behaviour for submitting work before a deadline can be described spectacularly well by a simple “universal” law. We also analyse this behaviour as a function of several other factors, such as gender, age, proposal size, number of co-authors and the subsequent success of a submitted proposal.