Struck by a market-making provocation from today: "Imagine a world where you love how you make choices and you love how you're directing your attention, because tech inventors are competing to figure out how best to help you live as you intend."
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It's not clear how to align incentives so that this becomes a relevant design question for tech co's, but I'm enjoying the prompt. It's interesting that OSes have contacts, calendars, docs, etc—yet no representation of anything purposive, of ways of being, of "what matters?"
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Funny to contrast the ubiquitous to-do app's model with intentions which might deeply matter to someone, like "I want to make sure I'm taking my ideas as seriously as possible." Tasks are such a misleading way of thinking about intention. But hey, it's easier to build a to-do UI!
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I wonder for what % of people the key bottlenecks to “loving the way one makes choices” can be influenced by consumer products at all. For me, actually, I think they can be! But it’s easy to imagine the issue being, say, family / physical health / money / etc
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So! This is deeply intertwined with goal directed behavior. It is genuinely hard to convey a goal to another entity and have them act creatively toward its accomplishment. Transmission -> comprehension -> exploration and experimentation. ...
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In the near future you will see more entities learn and develop their own goals independent of human provided tasks. This will provide the necessary skill substrate for them to both comprehend and achieve goals given to them by others. ...
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Might be interesting to go in the reverse direction: starting from to-do items, infer your actual categories of 'mattering'/intention/purpose.
So you might see something like a breakdown of your to-dos being x% career-related, y% family-related, z%-fitness-related etc.
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It might be useful to see how our energy allocation differs from what we might say when asked. (Of course it'd be easy for this to be biased by the sorts of things you'd put into a to-do app in the first place...)
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Mmm, yeah. I built complice.co to tackle this challenge, and I think it does an okay job of that! Instead of a huge backlog of TODOs, you have your big picture goals then each day you ask freshly "what am I going to do towards these today?" & enter intentions
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I read Getting Things Done, and it struck me that a organisation system for both to-dos and values is independent from any UI.
Also, David Allen's GTD software (which I don't use) is quite ugly, just like the original mindmap software is. It's about ideas not interfaces.
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The power of an interface is bounded by the power of the ideas it reifies. (But it's not one-way: by instantiating ideas in interfaces, we can think some thoughts which we couldn't think prior, which may lead to even better ideas, which can then be reified…)
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There's also the huge space of self- improvement tech (exercise, nutrition, spending, learning). Maybe one limit on effectiveness is that the apps are domain specific, and there's no unified view of the competing demands on time/money/energy ? Or maybe psychology is just hard :)
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Right! Impulses:
1. Some of that tech *does* work well! Let's have more.
2. Part of the possibility space may require OS-level support?
3. Part of the p-space may require (something like) end-user programming?
4. Maybe only some regions of p-space can capture value it creates?
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