Today in talking with my mentor I once again realized the insufficiency of our digital tools. Even as a proper nerd using Linux and experimenting with all kinds of Software, in the end my tasks end up in notebooks, scraps of paper, on post-its or buried in messengers.
So I had some more or less novel ideas that would make use of idle technological space.
Eisenhower Desktop
What if your desktop background was actually an interactive Eisenhower Matrix, where you can move around post-its like on a real desk-top? The original desktop design metaphor of putting your apps and documents on there is rather stupid once you realise that none of these are ready for use - on your desktop you don't have a bunch of little closed boxed and swiss army knives and other tools, do you? You have things you actually work on spread out, so why not have that digitally as well? My desktop is empty right now anyways, as a Sway user I start my most common apps with shortcuts and everything else through search. Why do you need stupid shortcuts that take time to rearrange in a decade where you can search through everything on your computer within seconds?
Nagging Lockscreen
Phone Lockscreens and Wallpapers have already been subject to some experiments. There are also apps like Forest that look your phone and grow trees while you don't use it.
But I am not that type of person that wants software to control them, but rather to nag. For example when it comes to wake-up or bedtime, I have never been a fan of alarms or scheduling work as calendar entries, they are too inflexible and do not mirror the complexities of a creative brains life. Even with a break reminder like Stretchly on my desktop I am torn because I often get into a habit of somehow clicking it away, defeating its purpose - and if I configure it more rigidly I find some way around to kill it because I get annoyed
Instead the tools should offer gentle reminders, making us aware of trade-offs:
- is finishing that task right now really the best idea, or might you be much faster after a few minutes of break?
- are you in a deep flow state justifying extending your bedtime, or are you just caught up in something you better defer in favor of proper sleep?
- is it really worth to continue on talking or would you rather go back to work?
Awareness of such trade-offs is much more sustainable than clear-cut rules, because whenever I set a time to stop screentime I inevitably at some point had a very good reason to ignore it, soon invalidating the rule. Modern life is complex, and our tools should aid us in that.
So what if, like the Forest app, there was some incentive on the lockscreen to rethink the current situation. So if you wanted to go to bed at 21, with each extra minute you lose a point or have some indication that makes you reconsider whether your current course of action is wise. Because sometimes, you really have a focused evening.
Contextual Tasks
Most task managers just track tasks with some tags. But vital to my task management is the context of the task - is this a focus task that needs a longer stretch of time, something to quickly debug or research and move on if not progressing, does it need internet or not? Those tools I have used so far always put lists or projects or tags as first-class concepts - but actually the current context is what matters most, a combination of urgent projects and brain alertness and location and more, which could then be mapped to tags and stuff.
Task Messages
Why have I not yet seen a single messenger that allows sending a message with a checkbox, so that anybody in that conversation can check it off? Messaging Tasks is so common that it really surprises me no common messenger has that to date. I have yet to find somebody actually using a grocery app - they all either have a messaging group or use paper scraps. So why not make the messaging group smart enough to handle that?
Also, I gave my brain lots of space throughout the day to think but it manifests all these ideas only when I am in bed so I had to get back out to write this down now, really? ^^