EAGER: Identifying Principles for Software to Support Daily Action Planning

计划是人们实现许多共同目标的重要活动，例如减肥，省钱或提高生产力。然而，规划出具体的行动来实现这些目标可能会让人感到繁重、乏味和耗时。常见的时间管理工具，如日历和待办事项列表，可以帮助人们跟踪他们的计划，但它们不鼓励制定计划，也不支持人们制定计划的过程。这限制了有多少人定期参与规划。该项目构建了创新的软件，可以更轻松地制定日常计划，帮助人们实现时间管理和生产力目标。通过观察研究参与者如何使用这种新软件制定日常计划来管理他们的时间，该项目将确定未来人工智能驱动的系统可以支持定期计划并帮助人们实现目标的方式。成功地做出这些改变的人可以变得更有效率，更健康，经济上更稳定。所有这三个成果都对他们的个人生活产生了巨大的影响，并共同为我们的社会。这个项目建立在从初步工作的见解，设计和实施软件，支持规划过程作为一个概念验证。然后，它部署该软件进行一个小型的受试者内试点研究，以证明它降低了制定计划的负担相比，任何其他工具（纸张或数字），参与者希望使用。该项目将通过访谈、使用日志数据、自我报告数据和调查问题收集和比较数据，评估参与者的体验。这项早期工作的结果将为开发更普遍的技术原则提供基础，以支持与其他行为改变技术相结合的日常行动计划，这有可能进一步提高软件的有效性-该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

Planning is an important activity for people to accomplish many common goals, such as losing weight, saving money, or increasing productivity. Yet, planning out concrete actions to accomplish these goals can be feel burdensome, tedious, and time-consuming. Common time-management tools such as calendars and to-do lists can help people keep track of their plans, but they do not encourage making plans nor do they support people in the process of creating a plan. This limits how many people regularly engage in planning. This project builds innovative software that makes it easier to develop a daily plan to help people achieve time management and productivity goals. By observing how study participants use this new software to make daily plans to manage their time, this project will identify ways that future AI-powered systems can support regular planning and help people accomplish their goals. People who succeed in making these changes can become more productive, healthier, and more financially stable. All three of these outcomes have enormous impact for their individual lives, and collectively for our society.This project builds on insights from preliminary work to design and implement software that supports the planning process as a proof-of-concept. It then deploys this software to conduct a small within-subjects pilot study to demonstrate that it lowers the burden of making a plan in comparison to any other tools (paper or digital) that participants wish to use. The project will evaluate participants' experiences by collecting and comparing data through interviews, usage log data, self-report data, and survey questions. Results from this early stage work will provide a foundation to develop more generalized principles for technology to support daily action planning in combination with other behavior change techniques, which has the potential to further increase the effectiveness of software-based behavior change tools for many domains.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.