When I need to be in flow, I also switch off my e-mail notifications, log out from Skype and Twitter and make sure my physical desktop is clean. What do you do to get in the flow?

Imagine you would like to discuss an important matter with a specific colleague. You walk into her room only to discover that she is not in. You pick up your mobile phone, search for the phone number and call her. However, she rejects the phone call. You waste precious time walking to her room, your matter is not discussed and possibly you are annoyed by the fact that your colleague did not react. On the other hand your colleague is, due to your call, interrupted from her current activity. A major reason for such situations is that your context and the context of your colleague do not match. In the example above, the location and current activity of you and your colleague do not match. Nevertheless, you still would like to discuss the matter with her. You can either stay monitoring the room of your colleague or start a meeting scheduling process (for example using Outlook). Both processes require your attention and information to judge whether the right conditions exist for the meeting to take place.

We envision a system, which we call AYEC (‘At Your Earliest Convenience’), that facilitates ‘schedule and forget’’: A user can schedule a meeting and specify conditions under which this meeting can take place. He does not have to monitor these conditions (‘forget’), since the system evaluates when the specified conditions become true and subsequently notifies the intended participants. In this way, the system takes over the monitoring task.

For example, you would like to sit down and have a brief talk with two colleagues on a specific topic. You specify in the system which colleagues you would like to meet and specify that all of you should be in the same office, available for interruption and working on the same project. Currently, one of these colleagues is out of the building. When the system detects this colleague enters the building the specified meeting conditions become true and the system sends everybody a request to meet.

AYEC is enabled by evolutions in available sensory devices and the rise of ubiquitous communications. AYEC uses collected information to adapt to the situations of users. This paradigm is called context-awareness. This paradigm is currently being explored in the Future Workspaces project by Tom Broens, Cristian Hesselman and Maarten Wegdam of Novay.