User:Paul Clark/Design Study

Abstracted Motivation: A Points Oriented ToDo List & Scheduler

The project name is still being worked on.

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

My Log

Brief

Some people (e.g. this author) are lazy, they don't do the things which would be most beneficial to them at all times[1]. One possible solution is to mandate that rationality [2] and behavioral psychology be taught in schools, but even if you know are well versed in those fields, applying the concepts can be hard[3]. So sometimes (I think) it is more efficient to manipulate people to do what is best. Or even to manipulate oneself to do what is probably best. That way systems can be put in place which will ensure that the best option is more likely to be taken in any situation.

One place which we can take inspiration from is games. The most successful games are those that people are compelled to invest lots of time in (and to do this they must be efficient at motivating people). Some of the aspects which makes gaming so compelling may include: 1) Seeing a quantified benefit of a task completed (experience points, stats increases, leveling up), 2) working toward a definable goal (as opposed to a vague goal like 'success'), 3) working toward an achievable goal (just 10,000 more exp points), and a biggie - 4) being able to see all the people you are better than, or the people who were better than you but now are not.

So this program is all about augmenting RL with some of the things that motivate people to play games so often and 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. Some people think that doing the work of ranking the relative 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 the quantified results of your decisions are highly visible then you can become quite motivated, especially if you start out just ranking trivial tasks until you get some points built up in the system (i.e. make an investment in the virtual world).

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 e.g.

• 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.

Tasks whose points increase or decrease over time e.g.

• This task is worth 120 + 50*(%theDeadline%-(today + 1 day)) points. i.e. you get 170 points if you complete the task tomorrow, 120 if you complete it on the deadline, and the points rewarded decreases linearly with time, maybe you would even get less than 120 if you completed it after the deadline. Although when it got down into negative territory it would never get completed, so maybe there would have to be a automatically applied penalty to whomever the task was assigned to after the deadline has passed.

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. to enhance the social re-enforcement aspect
• When someone procrastinates they can choose to do a task because it seems like the most important thing to do now, when in-fact, the person doesn't actually qualitatively compare one potential task with another[4]. Indeed comparing apples with oranges is rather hard. Forcing someone to assign a worth (exp. points) to a task when it is first proposed means that the person has moved from comparing apples and oranges to comparing exp. points with exp. points, and if a points system manages to encapsulate the value of a task, then it is an unarguable that if one task has more points than another, it is more important.
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