High-Tech Time Management Tools

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Instant Messaging Eats Up the Hours

RescueTime, a Seattle software company that measures how long workers spend in various programs and Web sites so they can see how they're spending their workdays, says 44% of PC users' time goes to instant messaging (average checks per day: 77), e-mail, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. That's according to a company analysis of 500,000 hours of users' data. Tracking time spent—and wasted—can lead to subtle social pressures that benefit a work group, says CEO Tony Wright. "You don't want to be the guy dragging down the team," he says.

But workers find it hard to break the e-mail addiction. Companies including Intel (INTC) and IBM have experimented with ways to cut back on digital interruptions and furnish staff with more free time to think. Google (GOOG) has introduced a feature of Gmail called Email Addict that lets users take an enforced 15-minute break. Time management gurus preach about the ideal of entering "zero inbox" nirvana by dealing with queries immediately. Then there's the drastic step of declaring "e-mail bankruptcy"—nuking weeks' or months' worth of messages—that's been taken by Internet notables including Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig and TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington.

The latest research from the labs goes beyond cutting the e-mail backlog. IBM's work on creating a central place on the PC to accomplish work has academic links to a system called Taskmaster, built several years ago by the Palo Alto Research Center's Victoria Bellottti. That software envisioned a user's inbox as their daily "habitat," containing messages, to-do items, files, and links to the Web.

In a demonstration at his lab, IBM's Pierce showed how typing a few words quickly created a reminder, without the multiple steps most e-mail programs require. Dragging a message into a pane of action items to the right created a reminder to deal with its contents, while deleting the original message from Pierce's inbox. A mobile component of the system that Pierce is building would push out all the reminders about return calls a worker has to make to her phone, so she can deal with them on a train ride home, for example.

What's Worth Interrupting?

Microsoft's research on time management takes aim at an adjacent part of the time crunch—how to blot out the distractions reaching in from beyond your desk. "People get their time etched away piecemeal," says Horvitz, whose work on statistical models that can predict what's worth interrupting a PC user for has influenced Microsoft's Outlook product.

Achieve, which Horvitz hasn't demonstrated outside the company, takes initial input from a user, who might tell the software he needs eight hours to accomplish a set of reviews for his group, wants to finish as close to the specified deadline as possible, but doesn't want to spend more than two hours a day on the task. The system locks up time on the user's calendar so others can't book it. When the work is at hand, the software warns the user his communications are about to be shut down so he can focus. If he's not ready to start, Achieve looks for new time to book for the project.

Eventually, Horvitz says the system could be the basis for a Microsoft "platform for time management" that other companies could use to develop software products that understand concepts of hard and soft deadlines, have access to users' calendars, and understand what windows workers left open the last time they were working on a project so they can quickly resume when they pick up the work again.

Such systems could go beyond the reminders, to-do lists, and electronic red flags people use to prod themselves to focus on their work. "People use those lightweight tools with the best of intentions, and then the deadline flies by," Horvitz says. "With a battle cry of 'Beyond the red flag,' Achieve was born."

Ricadela is a writer for BusinessWeek in Silicon Valley.