Ambent memory machine

I have had a suspicion for a while now that people in offices spend a great deal of time chasing people up for things they have agreed to do. For example we have sold the old electric car but the electric car people forgot to tell us and didn’t post the cheque out. So working in an office becomes stressful due to the amount of time you have to spend contacting people to remind them of things they should be able to carry out them selves. Naturally it goes both ways, how often does some one ask you do to something and it doesn’t make it to you todo list. So much of the important stuff for me comes out of seeing someone informally in the corridor and being asked ‘yes just send and email to this guy and that guy and it should be fine’ or ‘have you looked at X’ All important stuff but you never have a thing on you to keep a note and you think you can remember.

I do remember that Microsoft had a project to record everything you did ( that’s so Microsoft huh). It might be useful to have an ipod which could record all your conversations ( passing and other wise), but the key bit would be to have an indexing system which would do the index of tasks/jobs from the audio system.

A truly intelligent system would keep an eye on how long tasks can take so you would be reminded promise something when you can’t deliver. The other aspect would be to have a central store of tasks which could be fed from different media.

For example imagine this meta system plugged into your email. If you emailed asking
‘would you mind doing…. Z‘ then the machine would take that as a request and make a note to remind both you and the recipient of task Z’ . Equally if the machine spots a text or email with ‘do you know or where is’ in the text it might make a note that some kind of task was being requested.

The key would be to have a sensitive reminder system. One which responded to your actions and needs. Perhaps I need reminding but If I dismiss a lot perhaps the reminder should wait a bit longer before the task needs to be done. Perhaps you need an ambient way to keep an idea or how many jobs you need to do a flock of flies which orbit with assorted tasks.

I’m not sure exactly what the technology is. We have fragments of it – automatic reminder systems and so on but nothing that does the whole job.