Weaving threads of actions for personal information management

Abstract

Our daily work consist of many tasks. We would manage our work, switching among many threads, which is the course of task execution. To support it, PIM (personal information management) tools have been developed. These tools, however, take no account of an efficient flow of actions. The paper discusses a method to weave the threads harmoniously, in other words, to suggest an action schedule which is efficient to its user from a total view point. In this method, a context corresponds to each thread. It is regarded as a sequence of states brought by acts in the thread. The method reorganizes several fixed sequences of acts into a single efficient sequence, being aware of whole contexts. For the reorganization, the paper presents an elaborate modeling of contexts and actions.