Optimal to-do list gamification
This addresses procrastination issues for individuals managing daily tasks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing gamification concepts with a new computational approach.
The paper tackles the problem of prioritizing tasks in to-do lists to overcome procrastination and neglect of long-term projects by introducing a scalable method for computing optimal point incentives based on long-term value, enabling real-world to-do list gamification apps.
What should I work on first? What can wait until later? Which projects should I prioritize and which tasks are not worth my time? These are challenging questions that many people face every day. People's intuitive strategy is to prioritize their immediate experience over the long-term consequences. This leads to procrastination and the neglect of important long-term projects in favor of seemingly urgent tasks that are less important. Optimal gamification strives to help people overcome these problems by incentivizing each task by a number of points that communicates how valuable it is in the long-run. Unfortunately, computing the optimal number of points with standard dynamic programming methods quickly becomes intractable as the number of a person's projects and the number of tasks required by each project increase. Here, we introduce and evaluate a scalable method for identifying which tasks are most important in the long run and incentivizing each task according to its long-term value. Our method makes it possible to create to-do list gamification apps that can handle the size and complexity of people's to-do lists in the real world.