TaskTracer: a desktop environment to support multi-tasking knowledge workers

Abstract

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.