1. PIM Research at PARC Victoria Bellotti Principal Scientist (bellotti@parc.com)

2. Overview Personal information management (PIM) in the wild And overload Embedding resources in email Activity management What is PIM? Personal information management means dealing with documents, messages, scheduling events, to-dos, contacts, notes Essentially the work we do to make it possible to do our work © 2010 PARC | Confidential

3. Postulating PIM 3 of 25

4. The Reality of PIM PARC | 4

5. Overload: Analysis of Time Spent in Email Microanalysis of samples of video observation of email triage The time that people are focused on dealing with incoming email Heavily interleaved with: Reading, skimming, editing, organizing, prioritizing, phone calls etc. Breakdown of time spent 23.1% reading email 6.2% scanning inbox 2.4% deleting messages 2% looking for messages 9.5% filing messages 1.1% spent adding attachments 0.8% opening attachments Most of the rest spent writing email and editing documents 20% of time looking around, searching for and organizing information This likely overflows into the rest of the day since email is an archive 5 of 25

6. Overload: Analysis of Thread Complexity Quality not quantity ~50% messages are threaded Index of complexity No. of threads X (days per thread/steps per thread) Seems to be a better indicator of overloading than quantity Obviously because there’s more to remember to keep track of 6 of 25 Active threads of the manager who complained the most about overload

7. Personal Knowledge Pad

8. Snapshot To-do Study Average about 70 to-dos and 11 places Only 14% of to-dos on paper-lists and e-lists 2/3 online, 36% in email, 12% in e-calendar Distributed across the workplace and elsewhere The to-do doesn’t describe the task Natural language may not be used Contextual and personal cue To-dos have multiple roles: Reminders: “I would like to remember to do this at an appropriate time” Planning tools: “What must I do next?”; “What needs doing soon?” Status indicators: “Done”; “Important”; “Priority” Indices: “What content is involved in this task?”; “How do I access it?” A significant minority of to-dos may not get done

9. All(most) in the Head A relatively tidy and explicit list Non specific Acronyms Incomplete sentences Nonsense Illegible An untidy and less explicit list “Beth blah blah” Manager at PARC

10. To-dos in the Wild We interviewed people in detail about their to-dos once a week for four weeks with a final 5th interview. We classified them What they were about and where they were stored We also coded them for about 30 factors that might affect their getting done, e.g., importance, consequence of not doing, difficulty, etc. Each week we asked whether the last week’s to-dos were done PARC | 10

11. Significant Determinants of Prioritization: Getting Things Done in a Week Hard-to-forget tasks Can’t-do-it-now tasks Factor Significance (random chance of data) Urgency <0.1% Customer <0.1% Is a meeting <0.1% Involving others (not mtg) <0.1% Importance 0.1% Non-discretionary 1.5% Common 5.6% Social Having no reminder 1.2% On a to-do list negative <0.1%

12. Conclusions People are good at prioritizing Only 1% of cases of dropping the ball (but none high priority) They just need more help with the PIM Resources need to be embedded in their work habitat PARC | 12

13. Significant Determinants of Prioritization: Getting Things Done in a Week Are these more important? Are these less important? Factor Significance (random chance of data) Urgency <0.1% Customer <0.1% Is a meeting <0.1% Involving others (not mtg) <0.1% Importance 0.1% Non-discretionary 1.5% Common 5.6% Why should we care about this data? Aren’t people supposed to be bad at prioritization? Having no reminder 1.2% On a to-do list negative <0.1%

15. Optimization No. Tasks The Challenge The challenge is to keep the dotted line as far to the left as possible This may move to the right in cases of overload, but that’s OK... As long as the line is straight Popular idea of poor prioritization is not supported So we probably don’t need to help with this But why do people think they are bad prioritizers? Slight evidence that assessing low importance tasks takes so much time that you might as well do them But... task management time and effort contributes to overload Documented as 20% of time in email How do we lower this cost? Make it MUCH easier; automate the drudge work Not Done Done High Value Low Value Overload Poor prioritization

16. Embedding Resources in Email 16 of 32

17. 17 of 25 TaskMaster In a small trial half of its users continued using it for months after end of study even though it lacked many features of Outlook

18. Optimizing for Activity Inferencing(under DARPA CALO Program) PARC | 18

19. Project Objectives Goals Simplify PIM and activity management UI that increases explicitness of activity context for better ML Design Innovation UX construct “Activities” that people can interact with System offers different human-meaningful ‘types’ (e.g. meeting, hiring) User creates instances of each type System populates the instance with predetermined containers & behaviors When user drags content to activity good stuff happens Meanwhile machine learns about this instance of the human activity RQ1. Will users adopt pre-designed structures? RQ2. Can we incent users to label their content precisely?

20. TV-ACTA TaskVista (TV) to-do list Activity-Centered Task Assistant (ACTA) embedded in Outlook Pre-designed folder component structure Paper to-dos Drag-and-drop anything into Activity: automatic organization into contacts, documents, correspondence Drag-and-drop or type-in to-do and Promote to Activity

21. More Features: Unified Content Collection

22. Structured Documents Drag-and-drop Agenda with Attendees and Final Materials Presentations and Documents

23. Structured Email:One menu-selection to email agenda to all Attendees

24. Useful Activity-Related Forms Links

25. Instant Map No need to type in address again; address came from agenda

26. Evaluation RQ1. Will users adopt pre-designed structures? Yes, more Activities created than folders RQ2. Can we incent users to label their content? Yes, users selected specific Activity types and used components Users find Activity template approach appealing in spite of bugs and even without ML benefits Justifies further exploration of this approach

27. Ongoing Research: Logging and Visualizing plus Activity Inferencing PARC | 27

28. Hybrid Field Research PARC | 28