User:Paul Clark/Design Study

Abstracted Motivation: A Points Oriented ToDo List & Scheduler

The name is still being worked on.

Also, the page as it is now was written hastily and the sentance/paragraph structure isn't written to aid readability, this will be remedied shortly

Brief

Some people (e.g. this author) are lazy. Some people don't think that doing the work of ranking the value of a task and entering it into a PC program before even starting it will not motivate people. I think that once you get used to ranking tasks and if you start out slow and get some points built up in the system (i.e. make an investment in the virtual world) then with the high visiblilty of your stats, and the quantifiable increases with each task completed, you will become quite motivated.

So this program is all about augmenting RL with the things that motivate people to play games so often and with with so much commitment. I am aware that this sounds like a rather broad goal, but hopefully the proposed OO nature of the design will make achieving this goal a matter of many small incremental additions.

Planned Features (including Future Work

There will be multiple views of the same basic scheduler/ToDo system i.e.

• Classic (outlook) style view of calender with views of upcoming tasks sorted by priority or chronologically.
• Avatar + stats + task lists as above (more in the style of epicWinApp
• An XMPP extension so that you can use your points to get social status and give you even more motivation.

A reg-exp-y based scheduler i.e.

• This event occurs at 10/03/2010 0700 hrs + i*7 days (so it repeats at the same time every week). Java's clander class should be able to handle months with weird numbers of days &c.

Points to keep in mind:

• Different people are motivated by different things (thanks Simon)
• Could sync stats and tasks with other platforms like phones, fb &c.
•  ???