Jaime Teevan (Microsoft Research)

Microproductivity: Getting Big Things Done with Little Microtasks

Many of the chunks of time we have in a day are too short to bother trying to use productively. Think of the time you spend waiting for a meeting to start, riding in an elevator, or standing in line. We try to defrag our time by booking meetings with ourselves, turning off our phones, and taking email vacations. But there is another way. Rather than fighting fragmentation by changing how we work, we can embrace it by changing our tasks to fit the way we actually do work. We call this microproductivity, in which large productivity tasks are broken down into a series of smaller microtasks. The component microtasks can then be completed by the task owner via selfsourcing, or by the crowd via crowdsourcing. The transformation of work into microwork will change when and how people work, and enable individuals and automated processes to efficiently and easily complete complex tasks.