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Organization

Ã...bo Akademi University

Project Description

Mobile solutions for time management in knowledge work

Project Abstract

Knowledge workers operate in a more hectic and pressured environment than ever before. Additional demands are being placed on the workers' competence, cooperation skills, cooperation volume and overall efficiency, at the same time as personal assistants and personal secretaries are becoming a rare species even in the highest ranks of management. Managing time is a key skill becoming more central in line with the heightened demands on personal performance. It is not a problem easily solved by calculations or software, as we are not dealing with a simple scheduling problem where e.g. optimization could provide a solution, such as when scheduling classrooms or perhaps even factory workers. Personal scheduling preferences, personality, organizational hierarchies, intricacies of interaction and scheduling unpredictability in general all play a role in making personal time management everything but a simple scheduling problem.

Most of the research conducted on electronic calendar systems has focused on desktop-based groupware calendar systems. These systems have gained popularity in especially larger corporations. A key downside of these systems has been the lack of mobility; the mobile needs of the users have been poorly catered for by e.g. print-outs from the calendar system or traditional paper calendars, which must then be manually âsynchronizedâ�? to the groupware calendar when back at the desktop. Mobile digital calendars offer groupware calendar systems a mobile component, and can also be used as stand-alone tools. The usage of specifically mobile digital calendars has to my knowledge been studied very little.

The research questions in my line of research are as follows:
1. Do current mobile digital calendars meet knowledge workers', especially managersâ™, time management needs in a satisfactory way?
2. How could the mobile digital calendar tools be improved to better support knowledge workersâ™ time management needs?

Surveys released for this project:
Questions
Mobile dig cal - utan koder 60
Mob dig cal - med koder 60
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