Background

Given the number of different demands on our time and attention, it becomes increasing hard to focus and find the 'flow state' where a developer can be most productive. Interruptions due to chat notifications, email, and updater applets all break focus. Additionally, the desktop metaphor has in most cases failed to evolve as the browser and other MDI interfaces have become the focus for many users, and increased performance has allowed us to keep more tasks running and present on the desktop at once, presenting a higher cognitive load to the user.

Aims

• To check my hypotheses about which problems cause the greatest overhead to the user
• Investigate better ways to group related documents and applications together
• To refine some ad-hoc adaptations I am using on my own machines
• If my hypotheses are confirmed, to make additional adaptations requiring more substantial code changes

Related work

• KDE Activities
• GNOME Shell Activities
• Windows Sets (not cancelled?)
• Windows Task View
• Android 10 Focus Mode