This paper reports on TaskTracer — a software system being designed to help highly multitasking knowledge workers rapidly locate, discover, and reuse past processes they used to successfully complete tasks. The system monitors users ’ interaction with a computer, collects detailed records of users ’ activities and resources accessed, associates (automatically or with users ’ assistance) each interaction event with a particular task, enables users to access records of past activities and quickly restore task contexts. We present a novel Publisher-Subscriber architecture for collecting and processing users ’ activity data, describe several different user interfaces tried with TaskTracer, and discuss the possibility of applying machine learning techniques to recognize/predict users ’ tasks.

We present data from detailed observation of 24 information workers that shows that they experience work fragmentation as common practice. We consider that work fragmentation has two components: length of time spent in an activity, and frequency of interruptions. We examined work fragmentation along three dimensions: effect of collocation, type of interruption, and resumption of work. We found work to be highly fragmented: people average little time in working spheres before switching and 57 % of their working spheres are interrupted. Collocated people work longer before switching but have more interruptions. Most internal interruptions are due to personal work whereas most external interruptions are due to central work. Though most interrupted work is resumed on the same day, more than two intervening activities occur before it is. We discuss implications for technology design: how our results can be used to support people to maintain continuity within a larger framework of their working spheres. Author Keywords Multi-tasking, attention management, information overload,

This paper reports a study of Personal Information Management (PIM), which advances research in two ways: (1) rather than focusing on one tool, we collected cross-tool data relating to file, email and web bookmark usage for each participant, and (2) we collected longitudinal data for a subset of the participants. We found that individuals employ a rich variety of strategies both within and across PIM tools, and we present new strategy classifications that reflect this behaviour. We discuss synergies and differences between tools that may be useful in guiding the design of tool integration. Our longitudinal data provides insight into how PIM behaviour evolves over time, and suggests that the supporting nature of PIM discourages reflection by users on their strategies. We discuss how users may benefit if tools and organizations promote increased reflection on PIM.

Figure 1: Screen shot of Themail showing a user’s email exchange with a friend during 18 months. We present Themail, a visualization that portrays relationships using the interaction histories preserved in email archives. Using the content of exchanged messages, it shows the words that characterize one’s correspondence with an individual and how they change over the period of the relationship. This paper describes the interface and content-parsing algorithms in Themail. It also presents the results from a user study where two main interaction modes with the visualization emerged: exploration of “big picture ” trends and themes in email (haystack mode) and more detail-oriented exploration Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.

We describe methods for automatically identifying signature blocks and reply lines in plaintext email messages. This analysis has many potential applications, such as preprocessing email for text-to-speech systems

We describe SmartMail, a prototype system for automatically identifying action items (tasks) in email messages. SmartMail presents the user with a task-focused summary of a message. The summary consists of a list of action items extracted from the message. The user can add these action items to their “to do ” list.

Email-based activity management systems promise to give users better tools for managing increasing volumes of email, by organizing email according to a user’s activities. Current activity management systems do not automatically classify incoming messages by the activity to which they belong, instead relying on simple heuristics (such as message threads), or asking the user to manually classify incoming messages as belonging to an activity. This paper presents several algorithms for automatically recognizing emails as part of an ongoing activity. Our baseline methods are the use of message reply-to threads to determine activity membership and a naïve Bayes classifier. Our SimSubset and SimOverlap algorithms compare the people involved in an activity against the recipients of each incoming message. Our SimContent algorithm uses IRR (a variant of latent semantic indexing) to classify emails into activities using similarity based on message contents. An empirical evaluation shows that each of these methods provide a significant improvement to the baseline methods. In addition, we show that a combined approach that votes the predictions of the individual methods performs better than each individual method alone.

With the rapid growth of personal computer networks and the Internet, sharing files has become a central activity in computer use. The ways in which users control the what, how, and with whom of sharing are dictated by the tools they use for sharing; there are a wide range of sharing practices, and hence a wide range of tools to support these practices. In practice, users ’ requirements for certain sharing features may dictate their choice of tool, even though the other affordances available through that tool may not be an ideal match to the desired manner of sharing. In this paper, we explore users ’ current practices in file sharing and examine the tools used to share files. Based on our findings, we unpack the features and affordances of these tools into a set of dimensions along which sharing tools can be characterized. Then, we present the set of user interface features we have prototyped in an interface called a sharing palette, which provides a platform for exploration and experimentation with new modalities of sharing. We briefly present the tool as a whole and then focus on the individual features of the sharing palette that support reported styles of sharing. ACM Classification: H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and

The identification and management of work dependencies is a fundamental challenge in software development organizations. This paper argues that modularization, the traditional technique intended to reduce interdependencies among components of a system, has serious limitations in the context of software development. We build on the idea of congruence, proposed in our prior work, to examine the relationship between the structure of technical and work dependencies and the impact of dependencies on software development productivity. Our empirical evaluation of the congruence framework showed that when developers’ coordination patterns are congruent with their coordination needs, the resolution time of modification requests was significantly reduced. Furthermore, our analysis highlights the importance of identifying the “right” set of technical dependencies that drive the coordination requirements among software developers. Call and data dependencies appear to have far less impact than logical dependencies. Categories and Subject Descriptors

Email consumes significant time and attention in the workplace. We conducted an organizational survey to understand how and why people attend to incoming email messages. We examined people's ratings of message importance and the actions they took on specific email messages, based on message characteristics and characteristics of receivers and senders. Respondents kept half of their new messages in the inbox and replied to about a third of them. They rated messages as important if they were about work and required action. Importance, in turn, had a modest impact on whether people replied to their incoming messages and whether they saved them. The results indicate that factors other than message importance (e.g., their social nature) also determine how people handle email. Overall, email usage reflects attentional differences due both to personal propensities and to work demands and relationships.