Selfsourced Writing

Productivity Decomposed: Getting Big Things Done with Little Microtasks, a workshop at CHI 2016 |

Published by ACM - Association for Computing Machinery

I found it hard to start writing this document, and put it off until the last possible moment. Complex tasks like writing are difficult to do because they seem to require long, uninterrupted periods of deep engagement to make meaningful progress. My goal is to change this. My colleagues and I exploring the idea of selfsourcing as a way to help people easily perform large personal information tasks by breaking them all the way down into microtasks that only take a few seconds each to complete. Using ideas from crowdsourcing and task management, selfsourcing can help people engage in difficult tasks, recover quickly from interruptions, and take advantage of existing small gaps in time to be productive even while mobile. Additionally, the subset of personal information microtasks that do not require personal knowledge or contain private content can be shared with collaborators, crowdsourced, or even automated.