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My ideal productivity tool
duus | May 1 2006
I was thinking about how to externalize so much of the stuff. There is always a lot we can't externalize. Unless I actually had someone else who would be my trusted system. Now, I don't want to hire someone. I want a droid. You know what I mean? A trusted system that was electronic and was saving files etc etc but had personality. A seemless kind of interaction like that. Something I didn't have to train so much. Something that tried to learn my ways. An "Alfred." I've tried to assign some personality to my trusted system, but I'm not fooling anyone: it's just my personality that I'm codifying. I want something that's a little more independent. Let's take the tamaguchi (sp?) and virtual roleplaying game technology and do something more useful with it. Not just entertainment. A virtual butler who kept track--and I mean KEPT TRACK--of your information. Would volunteer useful information. You could talk to him in a general way "Hey, I need to get milk at the store," and he'd file it away for you, remind you when you needed to go to the store. He'd keep track of addresses. He'd sort through your email. Let you know as things came up: "Several emails came for you in the last hour, and I know you asked not to be bothered, but one is from your girlfriend, so I thought I should tell you anyway." That is not beyond the technology of gaming software today, by *any* means. Why don't we have it? I'd buy it. I'd be willing to spend a lot of money on that. There are highly sophisiticated NPCs in computer games. What I'm talking about is trivial. Who'd want one of these? Who's interested in seeing if it can be done? Anyone have any resources out there to exploit? I have a few ideas... 7 Comments
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 I did not mean that...Submitted by mcnicks on May 2, 2006 - 5:30am.
I did not mean that in a pejorative way: it is perhaps more a statement about my own reaction to reminders that I think of them as 'nags'. I guess my concern is that it will be very difficult to design any kind of automated system that will be able to process the vast amount of priorities and interdependancies that occupy our lives, and make sensible decisions about how and when to interrupt us. That is not to say that some system or other might be able to infer as much, given a clever enough set of rules. I just think that it may not be worth investing the time to build such a system and then train it to recognise and understand our own, individual foibles. Our brains are already great at processing vast amounts of information and making these kinds of judgements on an intuitive level. The point about GTD, in my opinion, is making sure that our brains have all of the facts to hand to make the right call at the right time. Having said that, any tools that can help to manage the process of gathering, filtering and presenting the facts can only be a good thing. » POSTED IN:
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