Idea Is Queen!

After posting the Idea Day25, in which I mentioned continuous partial attention syndrome in the end, my mind was occupied by brainstorming a way to alleviate this problem. And the following is what I came up with, though it’s not a web based idea.

As web workers, we are multitaskers, and often suffer from syndrome of continous partial attention or interruption overload. In my opinion, set up priority for every task is a quick solution. Most interruptions come from occasional IM chatting, addiction of checking emails several times a day, tons of RSS feeds update notification, and endless referential or relevant links on every article you read, which results in endless tabs (unread) on your FireFox. To assign priority to each task, I propose a widget-sized, flexible application that mashups with any email, IM, RSS reader, browser and even comment section of blogs. A concept of how it work:

• a.) The app, Priority Assistant, obtains information of frequency you interact with apps mentioned above. For example, how many times you chat with a certain friends/ colleague on IM, from what addresses you receive the majority of mails, who you often send mails to, what subscribed feeds you must update/ read everyday, and the average numbers of tabs you open.

• b.) Priority Assistant then filters out the top 1 to 10 (or more, it’s decided by you) most important / most frequently interacted people, email address, feeds, or web sites, etc.

• c.) Only these contacts and applications’ immediate notification or update will pop up during your busy work. Otherwise, auto-notification (or even access to them) will be blocked. If it’s an important info that need immediate attention, the sender can include a key word (i.e. “!”) at the beginning of the message/ mail so that it can break the block. p.s. PA notifies senders that their messages have been suspended.

• d.) Moreover, going along with the alert of suspending, your prerecorded schedule/ calendar/ message will be automatically left to your friends, colleaguse or blog commentators outside the range of top priority. They will know your schedule and know when to knock your door again.

• e.) As to links, at the moment when you click a link to be opened in a new tab, PA (now hopefully embedded in the right-clicked menu) will offer you options of different levels of priority, you can choose from “1″ as a must read today, “2″ as to be read in a couple of days, “3″ as in 3 days, and so on. The number represents days, hours, or merely an indicator of urgency. Tabs will be aligned according to the number.

• f.) Of course you can fine tune all the configurations of priority options manually.

Another thought: If you open a new link with priority (0), which means you have to finish the reading otherwise that tab will stick on the browser…forever. It adds stress to you. But it’s also a good way to force you complete one task before going to the next, thus help you concentrate. After all focus is a cure for partial attention syndrome.

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