Tempus Fugit Milestone One

Paul Prae - Casey Gordon - Austin New - Hal Tift

17 February 2011

CSCI 4800/6800

Dr. Christopher Plaue

Introduction Technology for a More Productive You

Tempus Fugit is a tool that will help people use their spare time more effectively and efficiently. We want to help busy individuals focus more time and effort on items that are of the highest priority in their lives. Tempus Fugit will help preserve and organize important tasks and goals that other time management systems do not. Specifically, it will address tasks or goals which are important but not specifically or rigidly scheduled by time.

We want to create a system that maximizes the use of a person’s daily schedule by helping that person accomplish their personalized and prioritized to-do list during empty blocks of time. Ultimately, we want to develop a system that makes intelligent recommendations of what is best to do at any given time by integrating task lists, calendars, user profiles, and geographic locations. We want a personalized self-organizing daily calendar that just makes sense.

To understand what people need to manage their time and prioritize life goals, the research team created an online survey with 54 responses, conducted 13 in-depth interviews, and read academic articles on different subjects, including time management.

Demographics About our Survey and Interview Participants

Survey

We collected data from 54 survey participants in an online environment. Ideally, we’d have collected the same data off-line as well to ensure a well-rounded pool of participants. Many takers were routed from Facebook, further narrowing the demographic makeup of the group, but otherwise the participants were fairly diverse, including a wide range of ages and occupations, plus a balanced male-to-female ratio.

The data from specific demographics did not tend to differ sharply from others. The highest age range was the least likely to try new time-management software (with an average willingness of 3.8 out of seven), while the age range just beneath them was most willing at 5.4. Interestingly, the demographic most willing to try new software was also the group that rates themselves the best time managers.

Among participants who have tried time management software but do not presently use it consistently, reasons include problems with self-discipline, system difficulty and the attachment to traditional paper solutions that they can “carry around.”

Interviews

The team initially identified 6 possible target populations: children, teens, college students (both undergraduate & graduate), business/workers, homemakers, and seniors. Two children were informally interviewed and displayed no interest in the topic. We interviewed 5 college students, 2 professionals age 30-40, and 3 professionals over 50. No teens, homemakers, or seniors were interviewed. Interviews were conducted in person or by telephone. A set questionaire was written to explore team generated topics. Because this was exploratory, interviewers diverged from set questions when unexpected issues were raised.

User Analysis So Who Are We Designing For?

Our research has led us to target working professionals and full-time students as primary user groups. Specifically, we have three user groups in mind: full-time professionals, full-time college students and freelancers. Keeping in mind our own limited resources and taking into account the pros and cons of other demographics, we systematically eliminated them from our pool of primary groups.

FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES

The majority of our survey participants turned out to be full-time employees, making up 55% of responses. On average, they ranked themselves as being above-average at time management at 4.8 on a scale of one to seven. In addition to representing the largest portion of our potential users, this group may be the most in need of a system to help prioritize important tasks that are not urgent because of the non-stop nature of full-time jobs.

UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Undergraduate and graduate students were the second most frequent participants of our survey, representing 26% of responses. From day to day, unlike most full-time workers, students’ schedules can vary significantly. Designing for these less consistent types of schedules will provide us with a more well-rounded solution while appealing to a large portion of our projected market.

While we did not have any participants who overtly described themselves as freelancers, we opted to include this user group as our third primary focus. While freelancers arguably make up a small portion of our market share compared with the above two groups, it’s our belief that they would stand to gain as much or more than any other user group because of their unique time-management complications. Most notably, freelancers

FREELANCE WORKERS

tend to rely on a greater and more diverse number of separate delegaters, while students and full-time employees are dealing primarily with one institution.

CHILDREN

Two children were informally interviewed and displayed no interest in the topic. This suggests that time management is not a priority, or else it is a task designated in large part to parents.

SENIORS

Of our 54-person survey the three participants who said they would have no interest in new time-management software made up 75% of our 60+ age group and included both of our retired participants. While the sample size is minute, this finding combined with our own need to limit the scope of the project was enough to deter us from including seniors as one of our primary user groups.

HIGH-SCHOOL STUDENTS

High-school students are a potential user group, but we decided not to focus on them with two factors in mind. First, the nature of their time-management needs overlaps substantially with certain needs of full-time employees and college students. Most notably, high-school schedules tend to have the consistency of full-time work schedules, while also having the variable home-work tasks of college schedules. Secondly, with that fact in mind, their projected market share is not large enough to warrant direct consideration.

Interview Analysis The In-Depth Scoop on Time Management

Our interviews provided some of the best realizations in comparison to all of our research. Our research team interviewed over a dozen people in person. This personal encounter with potential users provided us much information. Some of the better information arose through general conversation during the interview. The questions were often answered with extra commentary and side notes. We interviewed 2 children, several people in their 20’s and 30’s and and another several people in their 40’s and 50’s (We decided that the only useful conclusion we were able to draw from the interview with the children was that we should not design our solution with children in mind. They simply do not care about time management.). The ages were not the only way our interviewee’s were diversified. The occupations of the interviewee’s included college students, administration staff, a computer manager, an instructional technologist, a web developer, a library associate, and even a bar tender. It is important to note that though we noticed certain trends, we were also presented with a wide array of different opinions. One of the most important things we learned is that time management techniques are unique to the individual and can sometimes really be quite different.

A main goal we had while giving each interview was to discover the individual’s needs. After learning these needs we were able to see a clear view of the tasks that are involved with the problem we are set out to solve. Several trends were apparent with our interviewees:

● They want more free time. One trend that seemed apparent in every individual is that they desired more free time. Most of the people wanted to increase their free time in order to work on personal development, have fun, or relax. The interviewee’s wanted more time to spend on tasks such as exercising, getting their hair done, cooking, continuing their education, spending more time with people they care about, Tai Chi, calligraphy, walking the dog, and reading.

● Not all of them want to use their spare time more productively. Fun is important too. One of the questions we asked was “Do you think that your spare time could be more usefully spent?” This was a balanced split between “Yes” and “No.” The people who said “No” felt that spare time was not meant to be productive. They believed spare time was meant for fun and relaxation. One person answered, “Not really, in my spare time I don’t worry about getting specific things accomplished. I just try to enjoy myself during this time.” While another person wished that they spent their time more productively developing software instead. This latter person wished they would do anything besides letting their brain “rot” while playing video games in every spare moment.

● They want more skills. A few individuals mentioned that they wanted to spend more time learning an instrument. One said, “The only thing I can think of that I would need practice time for would be playing the piano. I do miss it and wish I had time for it.” Another few wanted to learn skills to help them with their careers. One young lady simply wanted to be able to schedule her LSAT study time more often.

● They need to be more organized. More specifically they felt they would benefit from being more organized. A couple people actually said they might have a few more friends if they were able to schedule their time better.

● They need to preserve tasks & goals which are important but which cannot be specifically scheduled. One interviewee expressed a need to manage goals which could not be scheduled at all. She had a paper “someday-maybe” list in which she recorded goals with requirements or conditions other than time, such as geographic location. Another interviewee keeps a paper list of unusual requirements or small tasks for long-term, ongoing projects such as language study. A third interviewee was interested almost exclusively in maintaining and organizing friendships.

● They want alternatives to software. Another trend we noticed was that people tend to feel the need to augment their time management techniques, whether they use software or just their mind, with paper products. Many of the interviewees mentioned that they feel more accomplished by the simple act of scratching or checking off items on a list. Another person felt that they would have a better chance of remembering to accomplish a task if they wrote it down on a physical piece of paper.

When designing our software solution we will have to make sure to consider all of these needs.

The context of the time management environment proved to be of great importance during our discussions with interviewees. During one of our first interviews we asked our very first question of, “How do you manage your time?” The response was, “Do you mean at work or at home?” From then on we made sure to distinguish the two possibilities when applicable to the interviewee. Many of the questions we asked had different answers that were heavily dependent on the context. We learned that if you have more free time at work you must keep working. In the home life, more free time often meant more time to enjoy life. At work there is no time to manage because your time is managed for you. Most of our discussions ended up leaning towards the home life. This is the time that our interviewees felt needed to be managed more because they would personally benefit from it.

Our interviews also expressed the desire to make the time management system collaborative. One interviewee said, “I use my parent’s calendar to keep up with what they are doing and when I should come home.” Google calendar and many of their other products have shown the market desire for more collaborative and social tools. At first, our research team thought that a collaborative functionality in our system would primarily benefit professionals in a work environment. We learned through brainstorming inspired by the interviews that there are many collaborative ways to manage time and activities at work and in your personal life. Many events are shared. This is evident on Facebook. Many tasks are also accomplished together. This can range from gardening to taking care of a pet. It will be important for us to implement collaborative and task sharing functionality into our system.

The people we interviewed each had a different system for managing their time. They used many different tools and resources to manage their time. Their seemed to be two distinct categories of people that arose in regards to what tools they used. Some people mostly preferred using their mind and physical paper products while others were very comfortable using digital products. Note that almost everyone used a blend of physical, digital, and mental techniques. It was interesting to see how complicated and innovative people were able to get managing their time with various notepads. Many interviewees kept a pocket sized note pad with them at all times. They would then coordinate this with another larger more detailed notepad, a physical calendar, and/or a digital calendar. It may be wise for our team to think of how our solution can be integrated with all of these different techniques. It will also be beneficial if our solution can take all of the benefits from these other methods and make the transitioning easier.

Most of our interviewees were nice enough to provide us with advice on what our solution will need to consider. The major trending advice is as follows:

● Mobility. There was an obvious need for time management services to be mobile. As mentioned earlier, many of our interviewees carry around a physical note pad with them at all times. This shows the persistent need for something to record tasks as they come to mind, which can be at any time. This mobile modality will be a must in the design of our system.

● Learning curve/time investment. This will actually be extremely important for user acquisition later in our development process. All of our interviewees already had a time management system in place. In order for them to switch systems they showed concern that the new solution must be easy to learn. We must make sure to make it easy for people to be able to transition from their current system to our system. If our system is not obviously beneficial and it is not apparent that it is simple to start using, most of our interviewees feel they will not make the switch.

● Customizability and adaptability. As stated before, every user has a different life that needs to be managed. Our solution must be able to work given all the possible user cases that could arise in our target audience. This may involve creating a system that is as basic as possible.

● Privacy, Control, and Permissions. Our interviewees made us aware of two types of privacy that need to be controlled in our system. The user must give permission to the software to have access to certain aspects of their information. The second type of privacy is that between users. Both will be considered and should be simple for the user to control.

● Emotions. The emotional restrictions that our interviewees presented to us early on brought up some important aspects of the human condition. When asked when a person feels like accomplishing a certain task there seems to be this invisible requirement that becomes before all else. It is, “If I feel like it.” This is a completely subjective and emotional response to the desire of whether to do something. Our research team hopes to create a solution that makes sure to understand that aspect of our users.

Overall, our interviewees provided much more than we expected from them. We were able to dive into the lives of over a dozen people. We learned many different strategies for managing time. Every strategy was effective for the person explaining it. It will be of utmost importance for our solution to be adaptable to all of these different situations. We will make sure to consider all of the things that we learned into our design.

Literature Review

1. Farooq, S., Rehmani, R., Afridi, S. (2010). Enhancing Productivity & Efficiency with Time Management. European Journal of Scientific Research. Vol. 43 No. 2, 252-255.

Summary

This research paper focuses on how to conserve the time that we have and how we can use it more usefully towards our life pursuits. This is highly relevant to our problem. We want our users to be able to use their time to their greatest advantage. The introduction mentions how time management is often a casual process and

sometimes an after thought. Time should be considered a precious nonrenewable resource. It is an important constant to all the things that we do. Our team agrees with these conclusions and we hope to create a solution that takes these points into account.

Our team hopes to take the advice and research presented in this document to create an effective time and task management system that can be used in a relaxed and casual manner. This system needs to enforce the special value that the allocation of our time has in our lives into a natural and comfortable but intelligently and dynamically changing schedule. This paper mentions that we critically manage tangible assets like money and relationships. It argues that time is equally or more important and should be managed with great importance. Our team hopes to create a system that understands this importance and helps the user realize time’s value. Our system will help the user be more committed to the items in life that the user subjectively feels are of a high value to them.

Users

After the introduction, the paper enters into a description of a corporate business person and this person’s goals in relation to time. This provided a good user case scenario for our research team. In the corporate world time is often equivalent to money. The paper argues that they should be treated synonymously. The choices of action of every employee can be put in perspective with time. The more heavily prioritized tasks that the employee can do over a given time shows that employee’s cost effectiveness. It is especially important for a manager to use his or her time effectively. It is also up to the manager to make sure their employees are using their time effectively. In a corporate environment, our system could help each employee be accountable for their time spent on tasks. A few things come into play here: the priority and overall importance of the task chosen, the urgency of the task, the difficulty of the task, and the time appropriated to accomplish that task. Our system could help ensure that the employee is choosing a possible task that is of the highest priority at that moment and is also not spending too much time on that task. This could then also help to improve on the problems that businesses face in cutting down costs.

Context

The paper mentions the concept of discretionary time. This is a time when the user has complete control. These are the times in which our problem is most obvious. Our team wants to create a system that makes the best use of this discretionary time. This is a time when the user would have a choice of what to do. Our system will need to help the user realize what it is they should be doing during this discretionary time.

Through much research this paper concluded that there are five major areas in which we must consider with our time management system:

i. The realization that the way we spend our time is largely habitual in nature.

ii. That setting personal goals is crucial to proper time management.

iii. Priorities must be categorized and evaluated.

iv. Proper communications are essential to good use of time.

v. Procrastination-- is probable the largest obstacle to time management.

i. The habitual use of time-

In this section of the paper, it is mentioned that our personal habits are essential in understanding how we need to manage our time. Through the data we collected during our interviews and surveys, we are getting a more refined look into the habits of potential users of our system. These habits will be especially considered during the design process of our system. At this point in our process, reflecting on our potential users’ habits will help us to define the context of the problem. Our actions absolutely influence our environment and vice versa.

ii. Goal setting-

We need to look at our users and their goals in the context of various lengths of time such as daily, yearly, lifetime etc. It will be important for our solution to be able to take into consideration the time spectrum difference between short-term and long-term goals. The goals a user may have in mind can also be involved within different aspects of their lives such as career, family, social, personal development, spiritual development and so on. These temporal and environmental contexts become obvious when speaking to individuals about time management. During our interviews, our research team found a distinct line between a person’s professional life and their personal life. Both contexts have similar problems and solutions but are very different from the individual’s position. The overarching goals at work are much different than they are in the home.

iii. Priorities

Prioritization and organization of tasks will be essential components of our system. The paper mentions how planning can take up more time initially but will save time during the actual performance of the activities. Our system will utilize this concept by helping the user with this planning process. We believe that turning a user’s goals, tasks, action items, etc. into a list that is prioritized by difficulty, urgency, and importance will help organize the user’s schedule.

i.v. Communication

This paper really stresses the importance of communication between people working towards the same goals or on the same or associated tasks. This social context of our problem is important. Our design must consider integrating the lives of our users when it makes sense to do so. This will make sense when an appropriate relationships between users is recognized and certain permissions are given to the system by both parties. Google’s Calendar application is a wonderful example of a socially connected time management approach. Within organizations, these networked applications can increase the effectiveness of a tool significantly. Our system will make sure to account for this benefit.

iv. Procrastination

The paper mentions how procrastination is a major stumbling block for almost anyone seeking to improve their use of time. This problem is of primary concern to our research team. We want to create a system that helps people avoid procrastination. To do this we need to consider a few dimensions of any given task. These are as follows:

● Unpleasantness. The paper says that we often procrastinate because things are not pleasant to do or we do not get any satisfaction in doing a particular activity. This is a core attribute to the problem that our team wants to solve. We want to ensure that these types of tasks are scheduled so the user is able to accomplish them as desired. This avoidance of unpleasant activities is a natural human tendency and must be considered in our design.The paper mentions that the result of completing these unpleasant tasks should leave the user feeling positive and may help encourage the user to complete other scheduled assignments.

● Difficulty. Throughout our research, difficulty has presented itself as a central factor in determining when and if we can do something. It was noted during our interviews how a person’s emotional state determines their capability to do something. If that person is not in the right mood, a difficult task may not be reasonable to accomplish. The paper suggests that difficult tasks be broken down into smaller units. This granular break down will allow a person to focus on one part at a time. Our team will focus on creating a system that can help people turn a complex set of tasks into emotionally manageable items.

● Indecision. Any person has the potential to get confused about what to do when. This is another component of our problem. This paper recommends that people make a decision and then stick with it without rehashing the problem. We expect our solution to help avoid this indecisiveness.

2. Sucala, M., Stefan, S., Szentagotai-Tatar, A., David, D. (2010). Time Flies When You Expect To Have Fun: An Experimental Investigation of the Relationship Between Expectancies and the Perception of Time Progression. Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal. Vol. XIV No. 3, 231-241.

Summary

Our team realizes the cognitive components of time management. This paper focuses on the human perception of time. This time perception “is essential for survival and goal reaching in humans,” as this paper suggests. It is important to note that this perception can be distorted by a number of factors. Our team has decided that the problem of what to do when is heavily influenced by urgency, difficulty, and importance. Each of these factors also plays a role in determining our perception of time. This perception of time is essential to our core problem because the solution we develop must consider the duration of tasks and activities in order to schedule them effectively. The user will be providing the data to our system and the validity of this data must be considered when recommending activities.

Users

When considering our users, we must take into consideration their perceptions on how long a task will take. A person’s experiences during any given activity or task can influence that person’s future choices towards the next activity. The experience of that activity should also be considered when thinking of scheduling that activity again. Our team hope’s to create a system that takes advantage of the information gained during an experience. If we can find an elegant way to gather this data and then use it to the user’s benefit, we will truly be creating a powerful utility for many people.

The main theme of this paper involves “such naive theories about time perception as: time flies during pleasant activities and drags during boring or stressful activities.” As the research showed, these naive theories are true about human perception. This research also suggests that these tendencies can cause discrepancies when people schedule activities. These previous perceptions of time that exist in a person’s mind can be severely inconsistent with clock time. This aspect of human error may benefit by having a machine assisting the person in scheduling tasks and activities for more reasonable blocks of time.

Context

This paper has heavy implications regarding the temporal component of a user’s environment. The paper says, “Expectancies are anticipatory beliefs that reflect prior information about the forthcoming event... Expectations guide sensorial information processing by allowing aspects of the sensory environment that are constant (previously processed) not to be processed in depth repeatedly.” An early goal of our team was to create a system that considered previous behaviors of its users and reapplied this knowledge to future scheduling of that user’s tasks. If a person consistently feels that an activity will take less time than it usually does, then this is a problem that our system needs to consider when recommending what a person should do for however long.

3. Zimmerman, M. (2010, September) How to Live Better on 24 Hours a Day. Men’s Health, Vol. 25 Issue 7, 138-143.

Summary

This article gives a wonderful review of an average American man’s day. It gives statistics from various research and from a survey that Men’s Health issued. The goal of the article was to give advice on how a person could make their life more time efficient. This article was beneficial to review because it showed our research team the daily life of potential users. It allowed us to look at the time management issues that arise in

a certain market. The writer, Mike Zimmerman, feels strongly about using your time wisely. He wrote, “Killing time is a subtle form of suicide - the slaughter of minutes and hours by a straight razor slowly pulled across your goals and dreams.” The problems our team has set out to solve through software implementations will help to cure such waste. Mike’s article provided our research team not only with statistics and observations, but also with a personal account into the life of a person who wants to manage their time more effectively. His emotions show the consequence of not doing so.

Users

The article focuses on a specific type of potential user, the American business man. It walks through a complete day starting with waking up in the morning and finishing with going to sleep at night. This 24-hour time management practice is something that our team’s solution will hope to augment. Mike is careful about watching out for every opportunity in your day for a better use of your time. This is exactly the problem that our team is facing. We want to create a system that does what Mike does. Our system could help to fill those free moments of time with activities that help people reach their goals.

Mike talks of researchers that argue “that time is better than money as an indicator of success. If you control your time, they say, you control your entire life.” A system that allows its users to have more control of their time would certainly benefit the majority of the 1,800 men surveyed. Robert Paguarini, a financial and time-efficiency columnist for CBS MoneyWatch.com, said, in an interview for the article, “If you can identify the gaps in your time, you can invest your time better so you can achieve higher returns on it.” This is an important goal our team has for the system we want to create for our future users. This article shows that potential users, like Mike, Robert, and the surveyed men, need something to help them use their time more effectively.

Context

Problems men face that are in need of solutions:

● Sleep Habits. The two aspects of sleep that are focused on in the article are waking up in the morning and going to bed at night. "Thinking you can function on abbreviated sleep is thinking you're a god. You're not; you're a human being who needs to sleep," says Neil Fiore, Ph.D., a psychologist and executive coach and the author of The Now Habit at Work. The article mentions that regular sleep habits can increase the overall happiness in a person’s life. Regular sleep can also make a person more effective at the tasks they do set forth to accomplish during the day. Sleep is a predictable task that our team’s software solution could easily help to regulate. It is urgent, important, and should be easy to-do.

● Spending useful time uselessly. The article talks of how much time we spend watching TV or playing around on the Internet. Robert talks of these moments and wonders whether that time is beneficial to the people doing so. Those moments are “the time(s) when you'll make the greatest gains in life," Robert says. “Want to lose weight? Start a business? Earn a degree? Learn a language? You succeed or fail at these things not as you sleep or at your job, but during your spare time.” Those are the types of goals that our team hopes to help people meet through our solution to the problem we have defined.

Free time, or dead time, that men have and its need for effective use:

● Commuting. Mike opens up talking about his commute over an 8 year period. He found that he spent “nearly 3 years of (possible) work time” on a bus in transit to and from his job. This is a serious amount of dead time that could be effectively managed better if given the correct tools. Our research teams suspect that there exists solutions for a business person to use their commute time more usefully.

● Waiting. Two-thirds of the men in their survey spend as much as 30 minutes a day waiting for something. This is a great opportunity for our team to create a solution that takes advantage of these moments.

● Time that Could be Free. There are activities through out the day that could use time more appropriately. Our team could implement a solution to this problem within our main solution. The time spent on tasks has proved itself to be important through much of our research. By timing tasks, we

could simply create a mechanism that keeps track of how much time is spent on something. Intelligent recommendations could be made for improvements so to open up more free time for more important tasks or activities. Moments mentioned in the article that are part of an average man’s day that could be improved upon:

○ Excessive showering

○ Driving alone instead of on a bus or in a car pool

Existing Solution Analysis In the broad field of time management there should be expected a near infinite list of competitors. From

ancient calendars like Stonehenge and Meso-american almanacs to modern, accurate-to-the-millisecond alarm clocks, the presence of time analysis has moderated the planning and calculation of human endeavor since the beginning. Fortunately, although less romantically, present times have developed chronology methods more accurate and readily accessible than the night sky. This advent has constricted time by making measurable the otherwise uncountable moments of every day, and, in its constriction, has called for a conciliatory methodization of daily efforts.

Methodization has occurred in three main products: to-do lists, daily planners, and calendars. Each of these has its own role in holding and displaying daily, weekly, and further suspended event information. Simple to-do lists tend to contain a fairly binary set of data: items to be finished by the end of the day, or the next few days, and items that have no real finish date, goals, dreams, out-of-the-way desires: urgent items and unnecessary, but desired, items. Planners are personal and include finite events. Calendars can be public (family calendar on wall) or personal and include finite events which are typically irregular. Paper itself requires user computation -- it works better for individuals more “grounded” and accurate in their prioritization and event interpretation. A basis on priority leaves little room for self-exploration and those “someday, maybe” goals which priority would override. One significant aspect though, that many interviewees mentioned, was the ability to mark out, to scribble over, to erase, to destroy the task notation once completed.

Digital applications largely copy the paper applications with added promises of portability, reduced clutter, and minor computational perks. Though these perks vary, they are most often realized as reminders, collaborative techniques, and functionality to record repetitive and regular events efficiently. Imagine a calendar nailed up in a kitchen only certain people can walk through (and only if they have an internet connection). These people may edit, view and collaborate as they please and, when the calendar time comes, the fire alarm goes off, everyone exits the burning kitchen and attends the specified event. This is Google Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, iCalendar, and MSN Calendar in a nutshell; they broaden the viewing room of a basic, wall mounted piece of paper. While this may be useful, technology can do better.

More current approaches to time management have gone beyond pen and paper. The most notable of these build on the smart phone platform. The mobile and changing nature of events reflects the mobile character of the cell phone. Surprisingly, PDAs are losing market share, though they perform seemingly similar tasks. The problem with PDA’s likely stems from a few observations: a PDA is used almost solely for time sensitive events, requiring more motivation to purchase, use, and continue using. The mere proximity of smart phones reduces the need for motivation dramatically. The innovation developed is largely done through simplification, breaking down planners, to-dos, and calendars into task lists: tasks with dates, tasks without dates, tasks with priorities, tasks without priorities, tasks with flags, and tasks without flags. These tasks can then be projected onto planners and calendars if they have event times. Weaknesses of this system are in their inability to schedule regular tasks and their inability to show proper differentiation between certain tasks (e.g. daily and long-term). Strengths are in its simplicity, its nonexistent learning curve. But, this strength can also be a weakness, as users are forced to create their own system of task names, what flagged tasks mean, the scale of priority and, when provided, label or folder names for task categorization. They still leave the computation of tasks, task priority, and task recognition up to the user in a very similar way to paper alternatives.

Complex multi-modal systems have been created with a great deal of research and planning. They offer great power, flexibility, and frequently involve a significant learning curve. A learning curve significant enough to produce explanatory books and seminars. Though our interviewees who used these systems like

Getting Things Done, Remember the Milk, and The Franklin/Covey system swore by them, they were all very open to a system more intelligent, and specifically systems that took into account long term goals.

A similar technology, Nike+, has had odd success. This success is widely attributed to its feedback mechanisms. Though catering to only one task, running, Nike+ convinces users to go running, to use their system, and, especially, to see improvement. Motivation like this is extremely rare for task management, exercise, and especially running, so it seems a combination destined to failure, but the data visualization and intelligence of Nike+ propels user motivation high enough to make one time users, two time users, and three time users returning users.

All existing systems require a considerable amount of user computation. Less formal solutions usually offer their users ease of use and short learning curves, but require users to create their own systems. More formal solutions offer users ease of use, efficiency, and a specific system, requiring less user overhead at a very steep learning curve.

Our project will collect the advantages of all of these tried applications -- its interface will be task based, it will have an overlaying, all encompassing system, and its system will be intuitive and motivating. Our project could exploit a niche -- the products reviewed organize their functionality around chronology, priority, and productivity or accomplishment. This focuses their functionality around urgency - getting things done, getting more things done, getting things done at the right time. Our project could emphasize importance, the other dimension of the Eisenhower task model. One example of this different emphasis could be functionality to manage tasks or goals which are important but not specifically or rigidly scheduled. “I want to remember to visit this bookstore the next time I’m in Atlanta” is not a function well implemented by any of the competitors reviewed. The project would complement calendaring systems rather than directly compete with their core strengths.

Task Analysis

Target User Group Based on our surveys and interviews, our target users are college students or business people. Generally they expressed frustration at limited or poorly managed opportunities for accomplishing personal goals. Phrases like “dropped through the cracks” “lost opportunity” “someday-maybe” were expressed. Our target group is busy, they work, whether at school or in business. And everyday urgent time obligations preclude or confuse other more important, but less urgent personal goals. The interviewees most interested in time management were also the most involved in one or more systems already and expressed interest because their needs, particularly for untimed or personal goals were not met.

Summary and Direction

Currently, most time management systems focus on control of time which naturally emphasizes urgency - getting things done, getting more things done, getting things done at the right time.

For our alternative, intelligence is key, based on personal prioritization of goals, awareness of multiple sources of information - specifically integration with calendaring and contact data, social networks like Facebook etc., geographic location, ease and flexibility of use.

Implementation should be multi-modal operating, at least, with cross-platform desktop, web and mobile capability.

Low time requirements, function which adapts to personal habits and preferences, and a short learning curve are desirable.