This presentation reports on work that was conducted for DARPA's Information
Processing Technology Office towards the development of a cognitive assistant
for busy multitaskers. It involved a short term study of to-do management,
looking at how people prepresent to-dos, and a more in-depth study of task
management in which we tracked seven very diverse professionals for a month
to see how they managed tasks over the longer term. I¹ll talk about our
ethnographic findings and our preliminary design work.
A major surprise was that all of our study participants, even those that
were not so successful in their career, were remarkably proficient at keeping
track of tasks. Everything that mattered got done in time. This was achieved
through painstaking use of a variety of resources that reflected the pressures
and constraints of the work that our participants did. Since many professionals
still complain about the challenge of task management, we infer that the main
problem they are experiencing is the effort that must go into being so proficient.
Since our ethnographic work ended we have been working on a prototype system
that is intended to reduce the effort that goes into task management and automates
some of the tedious and time-consuming aspects of this activity. I'll conclude
by briefly reviewing this design work and the resulting prototype.
This work was done with Danny Bobrow, Brinda Dalal, Nathan Good, and Jim
Thornton.