The problem

According to The Digital Noise Impact Report by Unily, an employee experience agency, 77% of their surveyed population felt that unchecked notifications were a distraction. And a third of these employees received a new notification every 15 minutes.¹ (a recent survey of 500)

The same survey found that 59% of all employees saw digital noise as adding to their workplace stress. Another 67% stated that they wanted more control over what gets pushed to them(notifications). 

Additionally the mayo clinic found that workplace stress significantly contributes to motivational burnout. And similar studies have found that burnout itself can cause stress making this a vicious loop. 

The Solution

Wayfinder is a desktop task/notification management application that leverages AI to create workday schedules and dynamically push/silence notifications based on the relevancy to the users’ current task. 

For the workday scheduler, users will be able to input their tasks/assignments for the day as well as their deadlines. The application will then break these tasks down in to smaller tasks and create a hour by hour work schedule with interspersed breaks based on the study from the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology

Additionally, users can log how long they took to finish a task and the application will take that information into account for similar tasks in the future. 

For the notification manager, users can log specific application that they are using or will be used for their tasks and the application will automatically silence notifications that are not from those applications during the time they are doing that specific task, users can make conditional exceptions to this if the notification that would have been silenced contains some message that notification will be allowed. In terms of messaging, users can create profiles for specific individuals and attach those profiles to specific tasks so the user will only receive message notifications from those specific individuals. 

For development I’ll be using amazon bedrock which is a program that grants access to various foundation models that I will build upon.

Bibliography

Unily. (n.d.). Digital noise: How to cut through the clutter and engage your workforce. Retrieved January 12, 2025, from https://www.unily.com/insights/guides/digital-noise

Sonnentag, S., Venz, L., & Casper, A. (2022). Role of work breaks in well-being and performance: A systematic review and future research agenda. Retrieved January 12, 2025, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361913348_Role_of_work_breaks_in_well-being_and_performance_A_systematic_review_and_future_research_agenda