When I get calls on my cell phone, it tends to be most irritating when I am in the middle of doing productive work. If I’m writing a paper or doing a programming project, I will often become completely immersed in what I am doing to the point where I’m oblivious to most of my surrounding distractions. Psychologists call this energized state of mind “flow,” and I find it crucial to working productively. Incoming phone calls abruptly break my flow, which needless to say is quite undesirable. I should only be interrupted by very important phone calls, such as family emergencies or job opportunities for example.
An ideal “smart” phone would solve this issue for me by taking into account both my work context and the phone call’s importance before setting off any alert mechanism to grab my attention. First, the cell phone should have a way to sense what activity I’m currently doing and suppress the call if I’m working and “in the zone.” Second, it should be smart enough to realize when I’m switching between tasks or taking a break. It should then notify me of any calls I’ve missed up to that point in time. Third, the phone should screen the purpose of the call and figure out whether or not the call is important enough that I’d want to be interrupted from my work to answer it.
These features are tough to implement due to the social-technical gap. The first two require some way for the phone to “know” when I’ve achieved or left flow. This is hard because the whole notion of flow may have an ambigious boundary (can you be partially in flow?) and because social exchanges may or may not constitute flow (what if I want to discuss something with a friend as part of my productive activity?). A first approximation may involve having the cell phone communicate with your PC and deduce your state of mind based on the task you’re currently performing on the computer. For example, if you initiate an IM chat or browse Facebook, the phone may think you’re taking a break and thus alert you to calls. If you’re in Google Docs, it will defer calls. The third feature is tough because it also has to deal with ambiguity. Importance of phone calls is relative, and it depends on time period and context. One preliminary solution may be to allow the user to assign an importance rating to each phone number in his or her address book.
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I agree with you that it is very disruptive when a phone call comes in when you are trying to do important work. (Especially if it is some friend trying to tell you something unimportant). Your "importance factor" of a call is a good idea where you can only get interrupted when it is an emergency. It is very hard for a phone to know if you are in partial flow as well.
ReplyDeleteThe importance of a phone call is a fairly difficult thing to gauge, but a phone that could measure this accurately would be incredibly useful. Like you said, sometimes you may be in a state of extreme concentration, and phone calls can be very distracting to the flow of work. Most current phones have an “emergency” option when making a call, but personally, I have never seen this function used. Automating this would be key, I think, because people have difficulty explicitly defining their roles/states. In taking more control away from the user, though, dealing with exceptions becomes more difficult.
ReplyDeleteI think that if there was a program to for the caller to rate the importance of their outgoing call, every caller would soon be rating their calls as high priority and the program would soon just be obnoxious and obsolete. If people ranked calls as low importance, the call receiver would probably be less likely to answer and make the sender think, why would I rate my call if its just going to be ignored.
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