Individual Differences in Personal Task Management: A Field Study in an Academic Setting Mona Haraty 1 Diane Tam 2 Shathel Haddad 3 Joanna McGrenere 4 Charlotte Tang 5 Department of Computer Science University of British Columbia ABSTRACT A plethora of electronic personal task management (e-PTM) tools have been designed to help individuals manage their tasks. There is a lack of evidence, however, on the extent to which these tools actually help. In addition, previous research has reported that e- PTM tools have low adoption rates. To understand the reasons for such poor adoption and to gain insight into individual differences in PTM, we conducted a focus group with 7 participants followed by a field study with 12 participants, both in an academic setting. This paper describes different behaviors involved in managing everyday tasks. Based on the similarities and differences in individuals’ PTM behaviors, we identify three types of users: adopters, make-doers, and do-it-yourselfers. Grounded in our findings, we offer design guidelines for personalized PTM tools, which can serve the different types of users and their behaviors. KEYWORDS: Personal task management, personal information management (PIM), individual differences, personalization, grounded theory, field study, contextual interviews INDEX TERMS: H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. 1 INTRODUCTION Keeping track of the things we need to do is a common human activity. It can start as early as grade school, when children use paper agendas to manage their homework, and extends to adults who often need support to manage both work-related and personal tasks. With the advent of powerful personal computing, it is not surprising that a plethora of electronic personal task management (e-PTM) systems such as the PalmPilot tasks, Things (task management on Mac), RTM (http://www.rememberthemilk.com), and Google Tasks have been developed. What is somewhat surprising, however, is that there seems to be little convergence in the market. Blandford et al. documented in 2001 that most users adopt general-purpose tools such as bits of paper and use mobile phones for their prospective remembering tasks [5]. Now ten years later, based on our own casual observation, the adoption of e-PTM systems does not appear to be any higher. There are, however, other e-systems that support adults in their work, where a small number of applications dominate the market, such as word processing, spreadsheets, and email clients. The same cannot be said for task management. Why is this the case? We suspect that existing e-PTM systems do not adequately accommodate the needs of a broad range of people. This points to a need to better understand individual differences in PTM, and to the opportunity to design a personalized PTM system that is more appropriate for a wide range of users. There has been previous research on how people manage their tasks (often referred to as to-dos). For example, Bellotti et al. studied how busy professionals manage their tasks [2]. Our study is similar to their study but with a different population; however, our analytic approach differs in that the primary lens through which we viewed the data was that of individual differences. The goal was to understand the similarities and differences in individuals’ PTM behaviors with a longer-term goal of designing Figure 1: Selection of participants’ tools for PTM. (a) Kirsten’s “Matrix To-do” list in a Word document comprised of 4 columns: (I) personal tasks, high priority ones highlighted in green, (V) work- related tasks, high priority ones in yellow, (II+IV) low+medium priority work-related tasks, (b) John’s task list on a paper, (c) Mary’s paper planner, (d) Google Calendar, (e) Email, using star or “mark as unread” to record tasks, (f) AbstractSpoon, (g) OmniFocus, (h) Things. 1 email: haraty@cs.ubc.ca 2 email: dianetam@cs.ubc.ca 3 email: shathel@cs.ubc.ca 4 email: joanna@cs.ubc.ca 5 email: scctang@cs.ubc.ca