TimeAlign Whitepaper

Version 2.8

Introduction

TimeAlign is a personal time-optimization system that helps align your time with your goals. It combines age-old productivity and time management best practices with the latest in behavioral psychology, wearable technology, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. Set goals, time block in your calendar, track activity, and receive data insights that guide future behavior and compound self-improvement. TimeAlign closes the feedback loop on time management by accounting for your tracked activity and scheduled time to quantify, understand, and align how you actually spend your time with how you planned to spend it.


TimeAlign will help you craft optimized plans, develop positive habits, and set realistic goals to align your time with your priorities and responsibilities. Invest more time in deep work, flow states, quality time with loved ones, and whatever else is most valuable to you. Our mission is to build technology that empowers you to craft a life in which you stay focused, live intentionally, grow consistently, and flourish. 

Table of Contents

Introduction

Table of Contents

The Time Alignment Problem

TimeAlign Feedback Loop

1. Goal Setting: Craft Your Life Intentionally

2. Calendar Scheduling: Prioritize and Block Time

3. Time Tracking: Quantify Time and Attention

4. Data Insights: Analyze and Visualize Data

Smartwatches and Digital Hygiene

Self-Discipline and Gamification

Data Ownership and Privacy

AI

Conclusion

A Note to Readers

References

Guiding Quotes

The Time Alignment Problem

We don’t spend time on what matters most. 

Instead, we squander our time on unimportant activities which lead to inefficiency, stress, unfulfilled potential, and ultimately, regret.

Our time is limited–we only have 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, and roughly 4,000 weeks in a lifetime. We now have the freedom to spend our time in more ways than at any other time in history, yet it’s easier than ever to distract ourselves from the scarcity of our most precious resources: time and attention.

With the advent of smartphones and mobile internet access, there are nearly unlimited shallow ways to spend our time—yet these same tools make it more difficult to discover true depth of experience. As the average attention span shrinks, we find it harder and harder to sustain the focus required to remain engaged with the present moment or access flow states. [11]

And it gets worse. Studies show that the average adult wastes over 24 hours EVERY SINGLE WEEK. People report a whopping  24.5 - 43.8 hrs of “wasted” time per week.

That's self-described wasted time that could otherwise be spent on something meaningful. The truth is, most people struggle to invest their time in the things that matter most—our actions are misaligned with our intentions.

In a world flooded with information and myriad bids for our attention, how can we align our time with our values, avoid distractions, and consistently achieve the elusive time-well-spent–or better yet, live a life-well-spent?

The trouble is, we don't make time for our values. We unintentionally spend too much time in one area of our lives at the expense of the others. We get busy at work at the expense of living out our values with our family or friends. If we run ourselves ragged caring for our kids, we neglect our bodies, minds, and friends and prevent ourselves from being the people we desire to be. If we chronically neglect our values, we become something we’re not proud of. Our lives feel out of balance and diminished. Ironically, this ugly feeling makes us more likely to seek distractions to escape our dissatisfaction without actually solving the problem. Whatever your values may be, it's helpful to categorize them in various life domains, a concept that is thousands of years old.

― Nir Eyal, Indistractable

There will never be enough time to do all the important things we want to do. Each day we decide how to spend our 24 hours depending on our goals, responsibilities, and desires. When we aren’t consciously deciding how to spend our time, we may be following someone else’s plan. Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, reminds us, “if you don’t prioritize your life someone else will.” [12]

Life is about making tradeoffs with our time, attention, and energy, but managing and optimally allocating these resources in alignment with our values and priorities is an incredibly difficult undertaking that humans have struggled with for all of history—at least as far back as the Roman Philosopher, Seneca, expressed in his famous Letters from a Stoic. [14]

Many people may recognize the limitations of their time but still struggle to spend it on what matters most. The data reveals a stark discrepancy between what people say is important and how they actually spend their time.

In today’s age, there is no shortage of professed solutions to this age-old problem. Countless productivity apps aim to maximize work efficiency, project management tools to increase our economic output, calendar apps to organize our meetings, and a plethora of task apps that help promote good habits. While many of these tools and techniques are useful, they are, at best, partial solutions to the Time Alignment Problem, failing to address the issue comprehensively.

Modern time management systems can improve our ability to understand and prioritize our time, but ultimately, we are still left with a landscape of fragmented solutions to the Time Alignment Problem. Many of us have tried hacking together multiple apps and spreadsheets to help solve the challenge of aligning our time with our goals and priorities.

Yet, the Time Alignment Problem remains unsolved.

How can we focus on our top priorities while weathering a barrage of attempts to hijack our attention?

How can we spend more time on what’s important rather than what’s urgent? How can we use our apps and devices to nudge us towards our goals, align us with our values, and help us become better versions of ourselves over time?

TimeAlign Feedback Loop

Our solution combines existing technologies in a novel way. An application that closes the feedback loop on time management, helping you develop realistic plans, make progress towards achievable goals, and live a life more closely aligned with the version of yourself that you strive to become. It works by evaluating intention versus action—what you planned to do and how you actually spent your time—learning from your past behavior to craft a better plan for the future.

The TimeAlign feedback loop can be broken down into four parts that, when combined, help you optimize your schedule and achieve a more balanced, fulfilled life. Many solutions include some of these steps, but the greatest value is realized when all four steps are integrated into a closed feedback loop.

  1. Set Goals
  2. Schedule
  3. Track Activity
  4. Data Insights 


This positive feedback loop is a “North Star” for TimeAlign; any changes to the product that result in a tighter, smoother feedback loop are improvements to the overall solution. While the earliest versions of the TimeAlign product will focus more narrowly on time management, this feedback loop will eventually encompass a much broader spectrum of self-tracked data and behavior change mechanisms that will combine to form a valuable and delightful self-optimization solution.

For the remainder of this paper, we will elaborate on the foundational philosophy of each step in the loop, describe how they are implemented in the TimeAlign product, and explain how each step interacts with the adjacent steps in more detail. We will also explore the power of wearables as a tool for time management, how we apply gamification techniques to the system, the importance of data ownership, and the application of artificial intelligence in future versions of TimeAlign.

  1. Goal Setting: Craft Your Life Intentionally

Choosing better goals starts with being more intentional with how we craft our lives.

Without intentionality, we are adrift, floating in a sea of information and blinded by a fog of distractions. Intentionality is the act of being purposeful and deliberate in our plans and actions. This means recognizing that our time is valuable and consciously choosing to invest it wisely. If we do not decide our own direction, someone else will decide it for us.

Our goals define our direction in life, and we derive them from what we value. This means we can determine our goals by understanding what is most important to us and clarifying our priorities into concrete objectives.

Setting clear goals is easier said than done. Many of us have no problem expressing our goals as fuzzy ambitions without a deadline or measurable metrics. For example, we may value quality time with friends and family, but we rarely clarify this value into a more concrete goal. Instead of saying, “I want to spend more quality time with my mom while I still can,” our goal could be to talk to her on the phone once a day for 30 minutes and visit her one weekend every month.

We can convert a vague understanding of our values into a measurable, achievable future state.

With TimeAlign, we can set time and habit goals for each week, month, quarter, and year, which forces us to quantify our goals in units of time. This allows us to track and measure progress toward and alignment with our goals. The TimeAlign system also integrates with other important self-tracked data for a more detailed measurement of progress. We can correlate our tracked activity data with other tracked metrics like mood, energy, and focus to uncover insights and help optimize our schedule to achieve our goals.

TimeAlign uses AI to help clarify goals based on an understanding of our values, our past behavior and our desired future. With the help of this personal digital life coach, we can turn our vague goals into concrete blocks of time on our calendar.

By evaluating our priorities and planning ahead, we are more intentional with our time and make greater progress toward important life goals. According to James Clear, behavior science expert and author of Atomic Habits, “Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.” Therefore, the first step in the TimeAlign feedback loop is to set goals for how you wish to invest your time and attention.

  1. Calendar Scheduling: Prioritize and Block Time

All of us continually prioritize our limited time—consciously or unconsciously.

Ideally, our values, principles, and long-term goals drive the decisions we make about how to spend our time and where to focus our attention, but we often make these decisions based on “urgent” responsibilities and short-term desires. How we spend our time and the focus of our attention determines our experiences; the collection of these experiences makes up the entirety of our lives and defines the character of our being. 

We’re constantly making choices about the way we spend our time, from the major seasons to the individual moments in our lives. We’re also living with the consequences of those choices. And many of us don’t like those consequences—especially when we feel there’s a gap between how we’re spending our time and what we feel is deeply important in our lives.

― Stephen R. Covey, First Things First

When planning our days, we heed the wisdom of Daniel Kahneman: don’t trust your impulsive system-1 thinking to make the best decision in each moment. [1] System-1 thinking is the fallible, intuitive decision-making process that easily bows to the whims of our desires and covets short-term rewards. Instead, we should engage our system-2 reasoning, the more analytical and precise mode of thought, to plan ahead and rely less on our impulses to guide us towards decisions that will benefit our long-term well-being.

We want to forecast with forethought so that our time is aligned with our goals and priorities.

Creating a task list based on your goals is not enough to push you towards them, even if you set deadlines. The addition of a calendar or schedule is more useful than relying solely on a task-list because calendars necessarily include the dimension and location of time which allows us to partition goals into smaller portions or time blocks.

Even if you have a prioritized to-do list, you still need to find the time to do the tasks. It follows that each substantial task should be assigned a value of time and occupy space within your calendar. “Scheduling,” writes Cal Newport, “forces you to confront the reality of how much time you actually have and how long things will take.” [4]

Our solution is to utilize the calendar time blocking method. The concept of time blocking (AKA time-boxing) is not new, but in recent years it has risen in popularity, and for good reason: time blocking is a powerful method for optimizing your schedule and staying focused on a single task at a time.

Psychological studies have shown that humans are poor multitaskers and that we pay a mental toll every time we are forced to context-switch our attention from one task to another. Time blocking helps us focus our energy on a single activity or task-at-hand, one after the next in sequence, which is essential for minimizing distractions and maximizing desirable outcomes, including flow-states and deep-work.[3]

You might contend that this kind of scheduling is useful only in the context of productivity at work, but we argue that time blocking can be used to plan your entire day–beyond the 9-to-5. If some of your priorities are to “get in shape” or “make new friends” or “talk to your grandmother more”, wouldn’t you want to set aside some time and remind yourself to do these things? Additionally, would you not want to give your entire attention to your grandmother while with her?

Another common objection is that the time blocking method is too rigid and therefore useless in a constantly changing day. While time blocking does introduce more structure into your day, a good scheduling tool like TimeAlign can be used to update your plan flexibly. This re-scheduling system becomes even more dynamic as the AI learns your behavior. Additionally, we argue that time blocking forces you to think more intentionally about how and why your schedule is changing, which is useful for optimizing future plans.  

In an effort to close the feedback loop as tightly as possible, we are making it as easy as possible to create, combine, and update calendars populated with categorized time blocks. TimeAlign integrates with your existing calendars and task lists and serves as your single source of truth for personal time management. The app is designed to reduce the amount of time spent actually scheduling and maximize the ease and flexibility of updating your calendar when inevitably faced with unforeseen changes throughout the day. This is accomplished through the use of a mobile application with simple drag-drop gestures and batch editing capabilities, tight integration with a smartwatch, and AI smart scheduling. Your TimeAlign calendar will send helpful reminders and timely push notifications to your devices for efficient context switching to keep you on track and focused, no matter where you are or what you're doing.

TimeAlign also categorizes projects and life domains. According to Nir Eyal, “Whatever your values may be, it's helpful to categorize them in various life domains, a concept that is thousands of years old.” Once you have thought deeply about your priorities and defined your goals, you may associate these goals to specific activities and color-code each time block in your calendar. Categorization will help you prioritize your time to achieve goals while maintaining a healthy, intentional balance across all areas of your life.

  1. Time Tracking: Quantify Time and Attention

If time and attention are our most valuable assets, why don’t we track and manage how we spend them? Why do we create budgets for our finances and account for how we spend our money but not budget and account for how we spend our time and attention?

Seneca once said, “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” Once we recognize how limited and valuable our time is, it follows that we should strive to better understand it. Once we have a better understanding of our time, we can improve our ability to manage our time. 

However, in order to understand and manage our time, it must first be tracked and quantified, or as we like to say, before you can hack yourself, you must track yourself.

Our fallible mental accounting of time expenditure should not be trusted just as we do not fully trust our mental accounting of finances. Our memories often deceive us, so we outsource to external systems that store greater amounts of data and cannot easily be corrupted. In other words, it is wise to track our valuable assets so we have a clearer picture of our past and current state to inform better decisions and future forecasting.

Augmenting our understanding of ourselves by collecting our own personal data is a core concept of the “quantified self”. The quantified self movement refers to the cultural phenomenon of self-tracking with technology and to a community of users and makers of self-tracking tools who share an interest in self-knowledge through numbers. TimeAlign is a product of the quantified self movement and we, the creators of the TimeAlign system, have been members of this community for over a decade. We are excited to see how the advent of wearables has reinvigorated this movement with better ways of tracking personal metrics, especially health and fitness.

As the saying goes, what gets measured gets improved. In his seminal book “Measure What Matters”, John Doerr describes the concept of identifying OKRs (objectives and key results) and tracking metrics that indicate progress toward those desired results in an effort to improve management.[7] We can apply this concept to our everyday time allocation. Tracked time can be a leading indicator, a measurement taken in the short term that indicates progress toward a longer-term goal or vision. Without leading metrics, we would not know if we are on the right path making headway until we either achieve our goal successfully or fail.

TimeAlign helps us track progress toward our goals with a leading indicator and helps us course-correct along the way. We can telescope into the distant future by extrapolating trends in the short term, then schedule our days and weeks more effectively.

The TimeAlign system uses a combination of manual time tracking and automatic tracking to hold the user accountable to themselves. Implementing some manual tracking methods is a deliberate design decision that aims to help users engage in the present and be more intentional with their time and attention. When a user is confronted with a notification advising them to begin the next scheduled activity, they must choose whether to postpone, cancel, or accept and begin. Once accepted, the previous time block tracker ends and the new one begins; the user is entering into a metaphorical contract with themselves to switch their attention and focus on the next task.

The user encounters some psychological friction associated with choosing to disregard their plan and consequently misalign their time or risk failing to achieve their goals. In psychology this mental state of inconsistency is called cognitive dissonance, and it is tacitly avoided whenever possible. The user is subtly nudged in the direction of the more favorable decision so as to avoid the negative feeling of cognitive dissonance. Systems that rely too heavily on passive tracking do not benefit from this behavioral nudge.

Another important feature of TimeAlign is not only tracking time but the ability to add context to the collected activity data. This additional information can come in the form of unstructured journal entries, notes describing the reasons for missing a scheduled time block, or annotations pinned to a data visualization. If we are trying to understand our time and improve our ability to develop better plans, it is sometimes helpful to explain the reasons for an outcome or flag anomalies that would otherwise be difficult to comprehend by just looking at the data. This exercise can help us solidify our understanding and gain clarity around our own behavior.

TimeAlign is also a hub for other quantified-self data. Any metric measured with duration and/or location in time can be integrated and overlaid with tracked activity data to illuminate unique insights. Our activity at a specific time is the foundation for understanding other aspects of our lives such as our health, mood, energy, and attention. Once we know what we were doing at a given time or throughout a day, we can correlate health data and determine how specific activities affect our health, or even understand how certain types of days or weeks affect our health over the long term. We can capture screen-time data and combine it with TimeAlign data to understand how focused we were on the task at hand. We could even track our mood throughout the day and gain a better understanding of what activities truly make us happier in the moment. In this way, TimeAlign becomes a life dashboard and control center to help us optimize our time more comprehensively.

  1. Data Insights: Analyze and Visualize Data

Humans are not built to intuitively understand unstructured data and statistics; it takes tremendous computational effort to convert raw data into insights and it’s downright impossible to expend enough mental energy to make sense of information if the datasets are massive. Data analytics and data visualization can bridge the gap from statistical models to human understanding and insight. We are visual creatures, so it is important to work with our biological constraints and not against them.

Large amounts of tracked data can be processed, and condensed into a format that is more easily consumed and comprehended. At TimeAlign, our visual design philosophy is influenced by statistician and pioneer of information design, Edward Tufte, and focuses on clarity, consumability, and richness of data. According to Tufte, “Above all else, show the data… Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.” We strive for graphical excellence by designing visualizations that are useful when viewed both on the big-screen and on mobile devices with limited screen space, and reports that are clean, concise, and understandable.

Simply becoming aware of tracked data in a consumable format is a huge step towards affecting positive change and active improvements. “The process of behavior change always starts with awareness,” says James Clear. But, it is not enough to track and collect data without effective tools to understand and act upon it. Large datasets are not useful if they are not processed and converted into clear data visualizations and actionable insights. Building a statistical model that does not account for noise or displaying a poorly designed graph can actually confuse the viewer or lead to false insights.

Our approach is to work backwards from the action to the insight to the data analysis and visualization. In other words, we must first understand the ways in which we would improve our behavior, then determine how to package an insight that might lead to the desired action, then design a visualization or recommendation that implicitly or explicitly leads us to that insight without obfuscating the truth.

Designing ways to consume large amounts of data on a small screen is difficult enough, making it actionable is even more challenging. It is necessary to present data insights to the user when they are most useful and actionable. In the TimeAlign feedback loop, the most useful time to ingest these insights is just before or during the exercise of calendar scheduling and goal setting. This is the period when we can apply actionable insights to make direct improvements to our plans for the future. Weekly reports can also be useful and actionable especially when you view the report on a regular cadence right before you build your plan for the upcoming week.

The fourth and final step in the TimeAlign system closes the feedback loop by providing the user with data insights that encourage better, more realistic goal setting, scheduling, and execution. Dynamic graphs displayed while the user builds their schedule and customizable dashboards in conjunction with weekly, monthly, and yearly reports can provide context and color to their understanding of time allocation and trends in their behaviors. Goal reminders can help keep the user on track throughout the day and cultivate good weekly habits. Well-timed recommendtions can help nudge the user towards the most valuable investments of time.

The TimeAlign life dashboard is the primary means of consuming data visualizations, and the more data integrations, the more useful and powerful the dashboard. Combined with the power of AI, the dashboard can be highly dynamic, showing users only the pertinent information that they need and flagging critical trends before they become destabilizing issues. It can package insights in highly consumable formats based on the context, sometimes a simple push notification is the most effective nudge and sometimes the user needs to see a graphical visualization to understand the insight. It can even recommend which additional integrations would be most useful for improving goal-setting and goal achievement.

By evaluating intentions versus actions, your self-optimization system “becomes a living and learning cycle that creates an upward spiral of growth” says Stephen R. Covey. Ultimately, we want our users to maintain progress towards goals and understand when their time is indeed well-spent, so the data insights are designed to yield useful knowledge, encourage consistent improvement, and reward you for aligning your time with your goals.

Smartwatches and Digital Hygiene

When was the last time you considered how much net-value you are getting from your devices and applications? If you haven’t given much thought to this, you may be one of the many consumers exploited by their own possessions. We should use our technology as a tool, and not the reverse. This means being honest about how we use technology and whether the benefits adequately outweigh the downsides.

We need our smartphones, notifications, screens, and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights.

― Tristan Harris

Many of us are fully reliant on our smartphones, a remarkably useful device that can be both attention-demanding and information-overloading. Smartphones can subject us to a constant stream of unnecessary push notifications, nefarious nudges, and endless possibilities for entertainment and social media dopamine hits available in your pocket at nearly all moments of the day. It can be overwhelming and perniciously addicting. Our recommendation is to be very diligent about how your smartphone is configured to limit these downsides as much as possible through best practices in “digital hygiene”, which means leveraging digital tools in a healthy and productive way.

You can also unlock value and establish excellent digital hygiene through the use of smartwatches. The common knee-jerk reaction to smart device wearables is to assume they would amplify the information overload and increase the power of your devices over your attention. After all, the device is attached to your body during most of your day and has an even more direct pathway to you and your attention.

It sounds counterintuitive, but smartwatches can actually be an antidote to smartphones thanks to the inherent constraints of the smartwatch user interface. Smartwatches aren’t good for much. The tiny GUI of a smartwatch makes it less than ideal for reading and writing long messages, and its low-bandwidth interface also makes it a poor vehicle for attention traps like entertainment, media, and games.

These inherent shortcomings can be used to your advantage. Your smartwatch can function as a high-pass filter for only small amounts of important information in the form of notifications and watch-face “complications''. This is dense information and it’s less distracting than the barrage of options and notifications you constantly face on a smartphone. You would be wise to leave your iPhone beyond arm's-length, configure your smartwatch push notifications to demand your attention selectively, and keep all other distractions out of mind and out of reach while you focus on the task at hand. This not only increases your deep-work productivity, but also encourages you to be present with loved ones or fully immersed in an activity.

Smartwatches allow for minimal interaction with the small screen, but for some things, a smartwatch is an excellent tool. One of those things is quickly telling the time, another is receiving timely silent vibrating notifications that can be checked and acknowledged with a tilt of the arm. The ease at which a watch can be used to consume small bits of information makes it the perfect conduit for calendar schedule notifications, simple reminders that tell you what you should be doing at a given moment or a reminder of some future event,  based on your thoughtfully constructed calendar. It is a helpful tool to keep you on track throughout your day, make more intentional decisions about how you spend your time, and stay the course while you make progress towards long-term goals.

TimeAlign is a system that encourages better digital hygiene by aligning your time and attention with your priorities and empowering you to live more intentionally. Unlike many popular apps, TimeAlign is designed to leverage your devices as tools for empowerment instead of attempting to hijack your limited resources and dragging you into addictive behaviors that are counterproductive to your responsibilities and long-term goals. This is achieved, in large part, by our focus on a tight integration between your task lists, your calendar, and your smartwatch.

Historically, watches have been used for little more than telling time. With smartwatches, we are able to evolve and enhance this basic capability. TimeAlign uses calendar integrations and rich informational watchface displays to allow users to quickly tell time with context. This means displaying not only what time it is but also what you should be doing at this time, how much longer you should be doing it, and what activities are upcoming.

Smartwatches are also excellent tools for collecting useful information about your activity. These wearables are full sensors and trackers that can help add context to your activity and more tightly close the feedback loop.

Smartwatches are powerful tools for better time management and digital hygiene, but while they play an important role in the TimeAlign system, they are not enough to ensure you avoid distractions and stick to your schedule.

Self-Discipline and Gamification

Discipline is freedom. This famously counterintuitive idea, popularized by Jocko Willink, is a powerful concept that exposes an undisciplined life for what it really is: a life without the freedom to spend your time and attention on what you decide is important. Humans need discipline to live intentionally, and the TimeAlign app is designed to encourage and reward self-discipline.

However, discipline is nothing without direction. Our discipline must be in service of our clearly defined goals or else we may be optimizing for something unintended and unimportant. Build a schedule, set realistic goals, and hold yourself accountable. This feedback loop will help you improve your ability to prioritize your time, schedule your days, and develop the discipline to stick to your plan.

Our digital tools should help us develop good lasting habits, not drag us down into bad ones that waste our time. We have described how the TimeAlign closed feedback loop achieves this in theory, but in practice, it requires intentional participation and a growth mindset. Technology cannot completely resolve human nature, but it can nudge us in the right direction and leverage our own psychology to influence us in positive ways as long as we are willing to change our behavior. The TimeAlign system uses gamification, the application of contemporary behavioral science to motivate specific actions and make the app more engaging.

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
– James Clear, Atomic Habits

The primary means of gamification in the TimeAlign system are the weekly data insights, streaks, and the Alignment Score. This score takes multiple variables into account including calendar completeness, execution of scheduled activities, digital hygiene, and goal streaks. The user begins on Level 0: Onboard. Over time, as their alignment score increases, they progress to Level 1: Organize, then to Level 2: Optimize, and finally to Level 3: Align. Each level gets progressively more difficult and shifts the user’s focus from establishing best practices in digital hygiene, to effective scheduling, to consistent execution, and ultimately to maintaining a balanced and fulfilled life.

The multi-level system leverages the Zeigarnik effect: when users see progress towards goals they will feel more motivated to continue that progress. Users are encouraged to increase their alignment score and level-up, but their alignment score may also decrease if they begin to lose focus or fail to maintain their schedule, which leverages another powerful motivator called loss aversion. By calculating a score to represent how well the user’s time and behavior aligns to their stated goals, we can align positive incentives and instill a sense of growth that inspires continued use of the app thereby improving user retention.

The TimeAlign system also uses personalization and ownership to connect more intimately with the user and encourage continued engagement with the app. During onboarding, the new user connects the app to existing calendars, chooses categories to organize their time, sets goals in their important life domains, and begins to construct a highly personalized representation of their ideal days and weeks. As the user continues to engage with the app and organize their schedule, customization of color pallets, weekly goal setting, journaling, and even applying emojis to their categories and tags can foster a sense of personal ownership in the user’s experience with the app.

As the app gains users, the possibilities of social comparison, groups, and competition begin to become more relevant as a gamification method for behavioral motivation. Users can either compare themselves to demographic averages or enter into friendly competitions with peers or simply share their intentions with others to hold them accountable and motivate them towards completing their goals. Additionally, users can join groups of other users that are doing the same or similar activities synchronously to help hold themselves accountable to their schedules. Super-users can even gain access to gated channels in the TimeAlign community based on their current level and accumulation of time-spent in specific activities.

Data Ownership and Privacy

TimeAlign is a tool that tracks your personal data and promises to use that data to benefit you. How can you trust that this sensitive data will not be exploited? Our society is currently amidst a decline in trust; trust that governments, institutions, and corporations have the users’ best interest at heart and trust that they won’t abuse users’ privacy. Countless breaches of trust, including shady backdoor dealings with tech companies, NSA mass surveillance revelations, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and TikTok’s invasive data harvesting practices to name a few, have turned many people against the idea of data tracking altogether and made skeptics of believers.

We share this mistrust and skepticism. An integral value of TimeAlign and the team building this system is a dedication to user data privacy. The data that is collected by TimeAlign is owned by the user and will remain anonymous to everyone else. User personal data will never be shared or sold, and we will never be able to view or alter data that is attributable to a specific user without explicit consent.

With that said, we do encourage the user to share their encrypted, anonymized data to help improve the TimeAlign system. All great consumer technologies are built with intense dedication to empowering users and constant improvements to the user experience and app utility over time. This is only achievable by collecting usability data and seeking robust feedback from our users. We are fully committed to an open and transparent dialog with our users so that they are always in control of their personal data with the power to dictate how it can be used.

TimeAlign allows you to glean insights into your own time allocation and helps you understand if you’re making progress towards your goals, but your TimeAlign data visualizations can also be used to communicate with others or help motivate progress towards goals through social accountability. For example, TimeAlign can be used to negotiate the right ratio of deep work vs shallow work with your manager as described in detail in Cal Newport’s book Deep Work.[3] Employees can communicate their ideal time allocation with employers. Partners could talk more openly about the breakdown of their time and try to design a life where quality time with each other is truly prioritized. Friends could share their goals and motivate one another to stay disciplined.

We believe a world where communication is supplemented by data is better than a world based solely on human emotions and faulty memories. For this reason, we encourage you to share your own tracked data insights in any way you please. TimeAlign is a tool to both understand yourself better and communicate your priorities better with others, all in the pursuit of crafting a better, more balanced life.

AI and The Future

The TimeAlign system is a tool and an assistant, not a panacea. It will learn from the information you input and it will help you optimize and stick to your schedule through data-driven insights and motivational methods proven by behavioral science, but you still need to define your own goals and return accurate data to the system in order to generate the most value from the app.

From a technical perspective, we are collecting unique user intention-action data and using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to train a personal life management AI. RLHF is used in situations where it's difficult to define a clear, algorithmic solution but where humans can easily judge the quality of the model's output. In the case of TimeAlign, it will be generating schedules and giving recommendations, and the user will train the AI’s reward model to further refine it based on the user’s individual behavior and preferences. The TimeAlign AI will be pre-trained based on best practices, general heuristics, similarity to others, and the anonymized data of all users, plus an integration with a powerful LLM such as GPT, then it is fine-tuned by individual feedback. As the AI is trained on more user feedback, it becomes more robust, more accurate in its predictions, and more helpful in its recommendations and behavioral nudges.

TimeAlign is not the first auto-scheduling app, but it is the first system that learns from tracked data associated with what you actually did in addition to what you planned to do. This understanding of your intentions vs actions is the key to intelligent scheduling and essential for designing useful behavioral nudges. Many productivity products that have “AI” in their name or tout the power of their auto-scheduler to improve your life are missing this key point. They are moving schedule blocks around and reorganizing tasks using rule-based logic with little regard for what actually took place at a given time, how long it took to complete a task, or where these daily activities fit into your broader goals. Your scheduling assistant’s intelligence is greatly limited if it cannot learn from whether or not you executed according to your plan. The data captured from actual behavior is essential for developing a system that can accurately plan for the future and flexibly update the plan as things change. TimeAlign closes the feedback loop on time management which unlocks the potential for far greater scheduling intelligence.

If we peer further into future possibilities and indulge our imagination, the TimeAlign system could train a powerful goal-aligned AI and give it the tools to truly drive improvements in your life. TimeAlign could become an ever-evolving digital assistant whose utility function is informed by your self-defined priorities and whose goals are inherently aligned with your own. In other words, this assistant would always have your best interest at heart by design. This could be the benevolent AGI of science fiction that collaborates with you in a symbiotic relationship, clarifying your ambitions, optimizing your days, communicating your priorities to others, and transmitting well-calibrated nudges to guide you towards a more ideal life. We’re nowhere near this reality yet, but we believe it’s worth spending our time trying to build it.

Conclusion

TimeAlign is our answer to a world where your time and attention have been commodified– a tool to help you develop better plans, fight distraction, and maximize time-well-spent. The TimeAlign system combines technology and behavioral psychology in a positive feedback loop so you can quantify and understand yourself in a new way and supplement your self-improvement journey. Ultimately, our mission is to build an intelligent agent that helps us craft a life in which we stay focused, live intentionally, grow consistently, and flourish.

A Note to Readers

The theories outlined in this paper describing the TimeAlign system are well-grounded in research and an understanding of current technology and behavioral science. Nevertheless, some unknowns and uncertainties remain. We intend to rigorously test our assumptions in the real world and refine our ideas and the implementation of the system over time. We welcome feedback on this paper, and we encourage readers and members of our community to challenge our ideas and help us build something useful together! If you are interested in these ideas and want to discuss any topics outlined in this paper, or if you want to get involved in this project, please reach out to us directly at <hello@timealignapp.com>.

References

  1. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow

  1. Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

  1. Eyal, Nir. Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

  1. Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

  1. Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

  1. Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

  1. Doerr, John. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

  1. Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd Ed.

  1. Mackenzie, Alec. The Time Trap: The Classic Book on Time Management

  1. Covey, Stephen R. First Things First

  1. Mark, Gloria. Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity

  1. McKeown, Greg. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

  1. Chou, Yu-Kai. Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards
  2. Seneca. Letters from a Stoic

Guiding Quotes

“It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.”
― Seneca

“Wealth, however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.”

― Seneca

“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”

― Seneca

“Everything we have belongs to others; time alone is ours.”

― Seneca

“We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights.”

― Tristan Harris

“By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones. But the closer we pay attention to the options we’re given, the more we’ll notice when they don’t actually align with our true needs.”

― Tristan Harris

“The ultimate freedom is a free mind, and we need technology that’s on our team to help us live, feel, think and act freely.”

― Tristan Harris

“We’re constantly making choices about the way we spend our time, from the major seasons to the individual moments in our lives. We’re also living with the consequences of those choices. And many of us don’t like those consequences—especially when we feel there’s a gap between how we’re spending our time and what we feel is deeply important in our lives.”

― Stephen R. Covey, First Things First

First Things First

- Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill

 

The Quadrant II process would be incomplete without closing the loop—without turning the experience of one week into the foundation for the increased effectiveness of the next. Unless we learn from living, how are we going to keep from doing the same things—making the same mistakes, struggling with the same problems—week after week?

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

― James Clear, Atomic Habits

"Time will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy."

― James Clear, Atomic Habits

“Professionals stick to the schedule;

amateurs let life get in the way.”

― James Clear

"Awareness is often enough to motivate change.

Simply tracking your food intake will motivate you to alter it. Merely writing down your problems may spark ideas for possible solutions.

The process starts with seeing reality clearly."

― James Clear

"In many cases, the bottleneck to achieving results is simply making the time to do the work.

You're capable of exercising, but are you making the time?

You're capable of writing, but are you making the time?

You're capable of reading, but are you making the time?"

― James Clear

“Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.”

― James Clear

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”

― James Clear

“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.”― James Clear

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement”

― James Clear

“Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.”

― James Clear

“The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.”

― James Clear

“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.”

― James Clear

“Above all else, show the data... Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.”

― Edward R. Tufte, The Graphical Display of Quantitative Information

​​“We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.”

― John Doerr, Measure What Matters

“Don’t expect to be motivated every day to get out there and make things happen. You won’t be. Don’t count on motivation. Count on Discipline.”

― Jocko Willink

“Discipline is freedom”

― Jocko Willink

“In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn.”

― Robert Greene, Mastery

“Eventually you hope to reach a stage in life when you know yourself even better than your mother. And then suddenly, you have this corporation or government running after you, and they are way past your mother, and they are at your back. They're about to get to you—this is the critical moment. They know you better than you know yourself. So run away, run a little faster. And there are many ways you can run faster, meaning getting to know yourself a bit better.”

― Yuval Noah Harrari

"Today having power means knowing what to ignore."

― Yuval Noah Harrari

“The focus for making any kind of change in the quality of one’s life has to be around the variable of deciding what it is that’s really worth your time and attention, and noticing all the ways in which your life is buffeting you away from those priorities. It takes a continuous act of recalibration because as much as we may be intellectually aware of the finiteness of life and the transitory nature of everything, in some sense we’re really not aware of it. We're not emotionally aware of it so much of the time. To live a life that you really can’t regret at the end of any given day, or year, or at the end of your life, has got to entail succeeding more and more at granting your attention to all of those things that most merit it.”

― Sam Harris, (Making Sense ep. #269)

“How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.”

― Sam Harris

"Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all."

― Richard Feynman

“Let us prepare our minds as if we'd come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books each day... The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”

― Marcus Aurelius

“The trouble is, we don't make time for our values. We unintentionally spend too much time in one area of our lives at the expense of the others. We get busy at work at the expense of living out our values with our family or friends. If we run ourselves ragged caring for our kids, we neglect our bodies, minds, and friends and prevent ourselves from being the people we desire to be. If we chronically neglect our values, we become something we’re not proud of. Our lives feel out of balance and diminished. Ironically, this ugly feeling makes us more likely to seek distractions to escape our dissatisfaction without actually solving the problem. Whatever your values may be, it's helpful to categorize them in various life domains, a concept that is thousands of years old.”

― Nir Eyal, indistractable

“You, relationships, and work. These three domains outline where we spend our time. They give us a way to think about how we plan our day so that we can become an authentic reflection of the people we want to be. In order to live our values in each of these domains, we must reserve time in our schedule to do so. Only by setting aside specific time in our schedules for traction, the actions that draw us towards what we want in life, can we turn our backs on distraction.”

― Nir Eyal, indistractable

“The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. Planning ahead ensures you will follow through.”

― Nir Eyal, indistractable

“‘Busy’ implies that the person is out of control of their life.”

― Derek Sivers

“Create large uninterrupted blocks of time. The only way to do that is to put it on your calendar. If it’s not on your calendar it’s not real”

― Tim Ferris

“If you make a decision based on how you feel at that moment, you will probably make the wrong decision”

― Seth Godin, The Dip

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days."

— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life​

“When you schedule things, you are forced to deal with the fact that there are only so many hours in a week. You’re forced to make choices rather than add something to a never-ending to-do list that only becomes a source of anxiety. And you can’t just schedule important work and creative stuff. You need to schedule time for rest and recovery and mundane things like email.

Scheduling things also creates a visual feedback mechanism for how you actually spend your time — something we’re intentionally blind to because we won’t like what we see.”

— Farnham Street

“Live your life by design, not by default.”

— Chris Williamson

“Consider establishing a consistent framework around your creative process. It is often the case that the more set in your personal regimen, the more freedom you have within that structure to express yourself. Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it’s a harmonious relationship with time. Managing your schedule and daily habits well is a necessary component to free up the practical and creative capacity to make great art.”

― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“A focused efficiency in life is more important than in work. Approaching the practical aspects of you day with military precision allows the artistic windows to be opened in childlike freedom.”

― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“Show me your calendar and I’ll tell you where you’ve been, where you’re going and who’s on the journey with you.

If your calendar isn’t working for you, get a new one."

― Seth Godin

An advantage of scheduling your day is that you can determine how much time you’re actually spending in shallow activities. Extracting this insight from your schedules, however, can become tricky in practice, as it’s not always clear exactly how shallow you should consider a given task.

― Cal Newport