- Prior work has studied how interruptions affect productivity.
- Multitasking is common due to external and internal interruptions; once interrupted, it can take upwards of 25 minutes to return to full productivity.
- Switching tasks often starts chains of distraction, where people cycle through multiple stages of disruption, and challenges with remaining focused are also compounded by the fragmented availability of work time.
- Task resumption is easier when a person is interrupted at a breakpoint, and when the interrupted task has a clearly achievable short-term outcome.
- An emerging approach is to address a person’s fragmented time and attention is to fragment the tasks into microtasks to be completed between interruptions.

Play Write: Multitasking

Microtasking involves breaking down larger tasks into smaller, context-free subtasks that can be completed in short bursts of time. This approach enables individuals to leverage brief moments of availability to be productive without requiring long, uninterrupted stretches of time. Furthermore, completing a series of microtasks can reduce task complexity, improve the quality of work, and increase resilience to interruptions.

Microtasking

- Play Write builds on existing literature on productivity and distraction to use microtasking as a way to help people make use of small moments. 
- Play Write allows exploration of how microtasking impacts an individual’s experience with mobile multitasking.

Additional Sections:
- Multitasking
- Microtasking

Boston College

Mobile devices offer people the opportunity to get useful tasks done during time previously thought to be unusable. Because cell phones have small screens, they’re useful for short, simple tasks. The researchers in this study designed a special app, Play Write, whose purpose is to make complex editing tasks more fragmented and achievable while working on mobile devices. Results suggested that the app made participants feel more productive and less stressed, and they completed more edits on a document using the app.

Multitasking with Play Write, a mobile microproductivity writing tool

Iqbal, S. T., Teevan, J., Liebling, D., & Thompson, A. L. (2018) Multitasking with Play Write, a Mobile Microproductivity Writing Tool. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, 411–422. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3242587.3242611

- With the rapid improvement in the computing power of mobile devices and their use in a variety of scenarios, users today have the opportunity to make use of fragmented time which was previously considered unusable.
- Rapid task switching is a standard practice on mobile devices as tasks routinely get interrupted, and it is difficult to allocate the required amount of focus that complex tasks require.
- The most common way researchers have explored to help people complete complex tasks while mobile is to support better mobile interruption management practices.
- Prior work has demonstrated how to algorithmically support task decomposition, breaking tasks into much smaller pieces than previously imaginable; microtasks can be designed to be independent of each other and require limited time and context to complete.
- Prior research shows that doing a task via microtasks allows people to produce higher quality work with less effort than doing the task as a whole.
- The flexibility and portability of microtasks makes them ideal for surfacing on mobile devices; they can then be performed anywhere, at any time, and even interleaved with other tasks.
- Play Write was designed as a mobile app for performing document editing microtasks, creating additional opportunities to edit during moments that are typically considered unsuitable for complex tasks.
- The app allows the individual to self-source microtasks that can be deferred and interleaved with other tasks, taking advantage of micro-moments that happen throughout the day.

Play Write: Introduction

Play Write: Related Work

- The researchers of this study chose to explore microtasking within the context of the writing domain because it requires fundamental but varied skills, including reading, analysis, reasoning, and communication.
- Considering a document’s developmental stage in categorization of micro-writing tasks is valuable because it scaffolds the work, prompts engagement with tasks people might normally skip, and eases cognitive load.
- The idea behind this app is that people can use small writing tasks to ease into larger writing tasks.

Additional Sections:
- Existing Micro-Writing Systems
- Micro-Writing Practices

Play Write: Current Micro-Writing Practices

- First, users create Play Write microtasks from an existing Microsoft Word document by clicking a specific button from a Word plugin.
- The button has the plugin extract text from the document that can be edited.
- An engine then looks through the extracted text to creator microtasks on how to improve that section, which then notifies the phone user that they have new tasks available.
- Based on feedback from the previous section’s study, Play Write exposes the following microtasks on the mobile app: fixing spelling errors, identifying wordy sentences, simplifying text by deleting words, accepting or rejecting changes, and addressing comments.

Additional Sections:
- Play Write Word Plugin
- Play Write Mobile Application

Play Write: The Play Write System

- Developers conducted a lab study to compare the experience of using Play Write with other traditional mobile editing experiences with Mobile Word.
- Participants were asked to edit a document from their mobile phone while watching a video on their laptop, with the video serving as a proxy for a continuous attention task.
- The study used a within-subjects design with the editing app as the factor.

Additional Sections:
- Participants
- Experimental Tasks
- Protocol

Play Write: Evaluation

- Overall, Play Write was overwhelmingly preferred for the divided attention scenario that was created for this study, with 13/16 participants preferring the app compared to Mobile Word.

Additional Sections:
- Document Editing Performance
- Video Watching Performance
- Multitasking Performance
- When Play Write May be Useful
- Summary

Play Write: Results

- In a world of fragmented attention and rapid task switching, finding large blocks of time to accommodate traditional ways of being productive is challenging, and Play Write provides an opportunity to use micro-moments to complete microtasks that contribute towards a larger productivity goal without a large time or attention commitment.
- Some limitations of the study include that it was performed in a controlled laboratory setting using documents that were not familiar to the participants.
- Play Write microtasks were more resilient to task switching between editing and watching the video, more than the traditional macro-editing tasks done via Mobile Word.
- While Play Write presents microtasks that could be completed with limited context, in practice researchers found that apart from spelling and grammatical corrections, microtasks like triage comments, shortening, and accepting and rejecting changes sometimes required more context than Play Write offered.
- Regardless of the amount of context provided, Play Write currently seems unlikely to ever fully support the range of editing that people are used to in their desktop editing experiences.
- While Play Write presents microtasks on a mobile divide to leverage micro-moments, they could be surfaced in other context to yield added benefits, such as on desktop editing tasks.
- Despite its current shortcomings, the developers believe that Play Write, and microtasking more generally is potentially disruptive to existing work practices.

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