We Need New Office Software
I’ve been spending the last few days trying to clean out my enormous mail box, work on opinion letters and articles, and think about a Big Article on office software I’m working on.
All that adds up to this thought:
Here I am, looking at all this new office software, everything from the first Beta of Microsoft Office 12 to new net-native appllications more focused on collaboration and communication and yet . . .
And yet none of them would actually help me with my work.
So here’s my dilemma. I need a tool which will be able to go through all the stuff that’s in my Inbox and my To Do list and constantly prioritize and reprioritize it, not based on some set of policies I set two years (or two months) ago, based on what I knew then, but based on knowing me and what I do and what I care about and reacting to what’s happening right now.
I don’t know about you, but my work life is full of unpredictable events and opportunities. Any email may be offering me a chance to speak at a conference, go to a meeting in a city I’ve never seen, or write an article on a topic I’d love to know more about (and this will be the perfect excuse to dig right in).
I want the office software I use to help me by telling me what I should look at next, rather than dumbly offering me 297 emails, sorted by From, Date, or Subject. (And yes, that’s after the Spam is gone — we use Postini, and after the dumb administrative stuff is sorted into folders I don’t have to look at right away.)
I want a little of that AI I keep hearing about to augment my rapidly tiring Human Intelligence — and I want it now, not in ten or twenty years.
Do you have some? Tell me. Please! [amywohl News]