Daydar

Social to-do lists

We all use systems for organizing our cluttered schedules, from the day planner to Getting Things Done. One time-honored method, if messy, is writing to-do lists.

Daydar is a framework that makes this process social: Can you learn from the working styles of others? Can you collaboratively create an environment of healthy competition by being aware of your friends' daily accomplishments? Can this help you to find a better balance between work and play? Within this framework we are experimenting with various systems, both physical and digital, that allow you to monitor your own and others' productivity, help you to get motivated, and enable you to document and visualize the process of accomplishing whole projects.

System description

The Daydar framework uses existing web- and desktop-based software to provide to-do lists as input. It has a server component that aggregates this and abstracts it to protect privacy, and retrieves information for various output agents in objects and computers that can ask for generalized data, or if a context is provided, appropriate tasks from the user’s own to-do lists.

In order to help users make sense of a large and diverse data set, the framework groups tasks into categories for different aspects of life, from Work to Social to Intellectual, either by having users tag their tasks, or by matching untagged tasks with similar tagged tasks.

Daydar encourages agents to use the following principles to encourage goal fulfillment:

Peer Pressure: Tapping into the spirit of competition as well as shame. Guilt is a powerful motivator, as anyone with a mother knows.
Peer Support: Drawing on the knowledge of the community. Comparing oneself to others can be a source of stress, but it can also provide comfort in knowing that others are struggling along with oneself, an avenue for sharing learning experiences, or a mutual goal. Eavesdropping can produce empathy.
Game Behavior: Tapping into the competitive spirit of the user. Good game design understands how to engage players. Along with peer pressure, this can be used by a system that “keeps score.”
Chunking Tasks: Reducing large problems into small ones. Humans are poor with perspective; abstract and complex tasks often overwhelm people. The user should be encouraged to break large tasks into achievable subtasks in order to progress steadily.
Timeliness: Getting the right information at the right time. Many systems do not take context into account when they constantly and dumbly alert the user when the user is not in an effective position to react. Just-in-time information retrieval agents could notify the user of a location-specific task only when near that location and there is time in his or her schedule to complete that task, for instance.

Daydar

Social to-do lists

System description

Henry Holtzman, John Kestner, Richard The

Paper