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Timeful Appointment App Learns, Optimizes Your Routines

Timeful is a new app that is now ready for download on Apple's app store. The program is an "intelligent time assistant" that gets to know you in order to help you to use your time wisely.


(Timeful intelligent time assistant video)

From the user’s perspective, Timeful works like this: You link the app to any of your existing calendar apps, such as iCal, Microsoft Exchange, or Google Calendar. You then tell the app additional things you need to and would like to do, providing concrete things like “buy milk” and more fuzzy things like “exercise” or “cook dinner more often.”

You also select a level of aggressiveness that you’d like Timeful to have when suggesting times and activities, from laid-back, to very ambitious. Timeful then provides you with a customized calendar that incorporates all of the things you need to do and want to do at the times that would be best for you to actually make sure they get done...

The way you react to the schedule provided will further inform the way that Timeful suggests things to you — the idea is that the more you use it, the better it will be.

One of my favorite ideas from Frank Herbert's under-appreciated 1977 novel The Dosadi Experiment. In the novel, the main character Jorj McKie, has a Daily Schedule, a smart scheduling assistant:

The Daily Schedule began playing to McKie as he emerged from the bath. The DS suited its tone to his movements and the combined analysis of his psychophysical condition.

"Good morning, ser," it fluted.

McKie, who could interpret the analysis of his mood from the DS tone, put down a flash of resentment. Of course he felt angry and concerned.

"Good morning, you dumb inanimate object," he growled... He'd been meaning to for some time to reprogram the damned thing. No matter how carefully you set them, they always got out of phase. He didn't bother to bridle his mood, merely spoke the words in full emotional spate: "Now you hear me, machine: don't you ever again choose that buddy-buddy conversational tone when I'm in this mood!"
(Read more about Herbert's Daily Schedule)

From Timeful via TechCrunch.

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