Timeful (for iPhone)

Procrastinators, beware. A new app called Timeful, designed by a team of experts in behavioral economics and artificial intelligence, could help you get your act together.

The free app for iOS launched Thursday and blends aspects of time management, task management, scheduling, and prioritization. The idea is to prioritize the tasks you hope to do while considering everything else on your plate at the same time, in order to make time for what matters most.

Timeful lets you write down everything you want to do with your time in one place. These include appointments and calendar events, as well as short-term tasks and long-term goals (written as a Good Habit, as we'll explain in just a bit). Below that list of what you want to accomplish is a calendar. You then estimate how long each task or appointment will take, and roughly figure out when you'd like to have it completed. The app syncs with other calendars on your devices to block off the time you need to complete your tasks and goals.

Timeful (for iPhone)A signature feature in Timeful is called a Good Habit, which are tasks that you want to do more often and that repeat over time, such as exercise or study. You can let Timeful suggest times in your schedule that you should block off for these kinds of tasks, nudging you to quit procrastinating and instead actually plan them into your day.

Timeful recommends times based on how long the task will take and when you have free time. When you tap on it to confirm, it trains the system to learn that this was a good suggestion, helping it best serve you as a schedule maker and task prompter.

The app has drag-and-drop capabilities, as well as a very simplified interface. It looks different from other time-management and scheduling apps for a good reason, according to the team behind it.

A Different Approach to Changing Behavior
"People's environments drive their decision making," said Jacob Bank, one of the founders of Timeful."If we want to change people's behavior, we have to change their environments."

Here, the "environment" is the app interface.

Bank is a computer science Ph.D. student who is currently on leave from Stanford. His partners in this venture are Dan Ariely, a well-known professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, and Yoav Shoham, a professor of computer science at Stanford, part-time Google employee, and expert in artificial intelligence and game theory. I spoke with the team by phone last week.

Their combined expertise is unique, and allows Timeful's developers to seriously consider not only the app's usability and functionality, but also how the app actually affects users' behaviors and decisions.

"We are fanatical about this resource called 'time'. [Time] is the most precious resource we have. It's more valuable than money, and it's more difficult to manage than money," Shoham said.

"Time is all about opportunity cost," Ariely added. "Every time we spend time on one thing, we take time away from something else." We often don't have a clear outline of our options, the behavioral economist added, so it's difficult to compute how to balance or figure out what is most important. You can read more about Ariely's thoughts on how mobile apps can motivate us in my interview with him from earlier this year.

A Deceptively Simple App Engine
Despite its simple interface, Timeful has a highly advanced technological foundation behind it. For starters, it's tapping into something the team calls the Intention Genome.

"This is a framework that breaks each intention into it's basic building blocks," Bank explained. The Intention Genome tries to infer as many properties about a task as it can; for example "prepare a presentation" is a "computer" task to be "completed at the office."

Ariely mentioned that Timeful also considers which hours during the day you're likely to be at a high-working capacity, as opposed to less productive. He said that while periods of high and low productivity certainly vary by individuals, there's plenty of research indicating that most people are better at focusing on complicated tasks earlier in the day.

"We're not starting from scratch for each person. We have a database to start from, but then the app learns from each person," he said.

Ariely also noted that, in general, technology has made it more difficult to solve the problem of allocating one's time appropriately.

"Research shows that task switching is daunting, and so is having a to-do list in the back of our mind," he said. But algorithms are no good at automating time management for us either. The solution has to combine both worlds: the personal and the computational.

"Machine learning and behavior psychology are our weapons," Shoham said.

For related advice, see my recommendations for using technology to become better at setting and achieving goals. Also see my list of 55 apps that can make you more productive.