As Herb Simon said:
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
My workspace has more than enough information to constitute an overabundance, and as a result, I don’t know what to pay attention to. The most obvious culprit is the sticky note. They’re a great reminder, but once you have more than a couple of them, I don’t know which one is most urgent.
My proposed near-future solution is to embed a simple LED indicator into the post-it to indicate how long until it is due, so that at a quick glance, I can see what I should be focusing on without having to read each note and prioritize.
I would expect something like this could be feasible in the next five years with current trends in battery efficiency, low power IoT processors, the constantly lowering costs of the hardware, and the physical scale we’ve already accomplished (see image below)
I mocked this up using a potentiometer and digital input as a proxy for remaining time and status of completion:
notestate – Fritzing and Arduino code
