Re: Indicating Messages' Urgencies and Importances

Evan,

Thank you. I'm glad that these ideas are also interesting to you.

While it is a big ask – putting on my idea-pitching hat – benefits include that learners would be able to more easily complete sessions of uninterrupted homework, workers more easily complete sessions of uninterrupted work, while simultaneously feeling connected to their peers, co-workers, and communities, not concerned about missing any urgent or important message.

Some operating systems (e.g., Windows 11) provide their users with "focus sessions". During these sessions, notifications and interruptions from applications are reduced or minimized. I don't know whether these sessions can be automatically synchronized across devices for users, e.g., with their connected smartphones.

In theory, messages having priorities, urgencies, or importances would enable new possibilities, new settings and configurations, for focus sessions. Users would be able to indicate that certain instant-messaging, social-media, and productivity-collaboration applications only be able to notify or interrupt them when a message was sufficiently urgent, sufficiently urgent from a co-worker or teammate, and so forth.

As envisioned, messages' priorities, urgencies, or importances might be from enumerated sets (e.g., "low", "normal", "high"), from more granular ranges of values (e.g., #00 - #FF), or from floating-point intervals (e.g., between 0.0 and 1.0). If from a numerical range or interval, text-string values could be mapped to certain numerical values.


Best regards,
Adam

P.S.: I thought of these ideas while reading a book on attention span, productivity, and modern technology:

Mark, Gloria. Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press, 2023.

________________________________
From: Evan Prodromou <evan@prodromou.name>
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2024 10:13 PM
To: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>; public-swicg@w3.org <public-swicg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Indicating Messages' Urgencies and Importances


Hey, Adam. The right way to do this is to define an extension namespace for ActivityPub that includes properties for the author's estimated urgency.

However, that also requires support by client software and some server software. So it's a big ask!


I think it's an interesting problem, though.


Evan


On 2024-06-17 2:23 p.m., Adam Sobieski wrote:
Social Web Incubator Community Group,


Hello. I have some ideas that I would like to share and discuss with respect to indicating messages' urgencies and importances.

With email, authors can indicate their messages to be of low, normal, and high importances. Similarly, with modern productivity collaboration software, authors can indicate delivery options indicating a message to be of high importance or urgency.

With means of manually differentiating mentions and public and private messages with respect to their urgencies or importances, users' applications could better determine whether, when, and how to notify and to potentially interrupt recipients (and when not to) upon receiving messages – in accordance with users' settings and configurations.

Providing users the means to differentiate their messages with respect to urgency and importance may involve extending schemas and vocabularies.

Any thoughts on enabling users to be able to manually indicate urgency or importance with respect to their public and private messages? Thank you.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski

P.S.: A related syntax idea involves appending an exclamation mark to signal a matter of urgency or importance to a mentioned user:

@alice@example.com, @bob@example.com, and @charles@example.com! the meeting is rescheduled to Thursday.

Above, the author utilized an "!" to indicate that they felt that the message was particularly urgent or important for "@charles@example.com"<mailto:@charles@example.com> who might have been preparing to present a slideshow at that meeting.