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."
Conversation
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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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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I've found it useful to do this sort of thing (less formally than you describe) diagnostically. But the tasks can't tell me my "actual" intentions; distilling those requires other methods. For me at least, tasks are reactive, not proactive. They represent my shallowest thinking.
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That makes sense to me. Really, the tasks would show more about your true values than your true intentions, and I think it's fair to say intentions are necessarily allied to conscious thought—so it would be pretty bad for 'discovering' them.