TimeAware: Leveraging Framing Effects to Enhance Personal Productivity
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Abstract
To help people enhance their personal productivity by providing effective feedback, we designed and developed TimeAware, a self-monitoring system for capturing and reflecting on personal computer usage behaviors. TimeAware employs an ambient widget to promote self-awareness and to lower the access burden, and web-based information dashboard to visualize people’s computer usage in detail. To examine the effect of framing on individual’s productivity, we designed two versions of TimeAware interface, each with a different framing setting—one emphasizing productive activities (positive framing) and the other emphasizing distracting activities (negative framing), and conducted an eight-week deployment study (N = 24). We found a significant effect of framing on participants’ productivity, and only the negative framing users improved their productivity. The ambient widget seemed to help sustain engagement with data and enhance self-awareness. We discuss how to leverage framing effects to help people enhance their productivity, and how to design successful productivity monitoring tool.