Notice

This project now has a full team and is not able to accept any more members.

Cal.m

• Swamped with tasks piling up on your desk, on to-do lists scribbled on post-it notes and in your notebook, and in multiple tabs and applications open on your computer?
• Working on projects and assignments intermittently between classes and meetings lined up in your calendar?
• Expecting a weekend full with leisure activities, perhaps some home chores, and spending time with friends?

If you answered YES to these questions, then you are living life in the fast lane!

Client

Gilly Leshed, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Communication
gl87@cornell.edu

In cooperation with Gannett Health Services

Project

The purpose of this project is to create ways for people to reflect on their busy schedules and lengthy to-do lists in order to help them calm down, reduce stress, and slow their pace of life.

The team will work with the client to:

• Design a Google Calendar sidebar gadget with the following features:
  • Reflection on today’s activities, events, appointments, and tasks
  • Visualization of the user’s overall level of rush and overload based on the amount, duration, and types of events and tasks
  • Sharing the gadget, e.g., between family members or teammates
• Design both the front end user interface and the backend architecture and database
• Implement the design both as a prototype and as final release
• Test the software across platforms (PC/Mac; IE/Chrome/Firefox/Safari)
• Deploy the software to target users in real life settings and evaluate its impact

Background

From email, through cell phones, instant messaging, online calendars, and the social web, more and more technologies in everyday life are affecting experiences of time. On the one hand, technologies are designed to free us from hard labor and save us time by helping us become more productive and efficient. However, this can easily lead to fragmentation and micro-coordination of work, make accessible an overabundance of information, products and services among which we feel obligated to choose properly, and increase our availability to anyone, anytime and anywhere. This, in turn, may support the “speeding up” of life and an increasing sense of rush and overload.

Objective

Can technology be purposely designed to support a fundamental human need to slow down, cut back, procrastinate, slack, or be inefficient? This need exists both in task-centric workplace environments and in busy homes with multiple family members coordinating their activities. The purpose of this project is to open a window for slowing down against social expectations to be constantly busy, efficient, and productive.

Technologies that support productivity, like online calendars and task managers, seemingly help us reduce stress by bringing order into the chaos of activities, events, and tasks. But at the same time, by using them, we commit to the idea that we need to juggle many things in our day. This project will develop software that helps people reflect on their rush and overload, and hopefully, slow down. It will do so by evoking reflection on one’s level of commitment as it is represented in their calendar and to-do list.

The broader impact of this project is in its potential to improve the well being of millions of people struggling and juggling through their busy, overloaded, and harried lives.

Note

This project is a successor to a successful CS 5150 project. GoSlow, led by the same client last year in cooperation with Gannett Health Services. The client reports that it concluded with an academic publication and a patent application, and is about to go live to the Cornell community. At least two of the students who worked on this project got their "dream jobs" partly as a result of the experience they obtained in working on this project.