Today at 5:00 am marked the time I could begin registering for classes. Suffice to say I didn’t wake up early for it and got around to it this afternoon instead. What really gets me though is how difficult and time consuming it is to register for classes. Hours are spent researching which classes to take, how various teachers rate on ratemyprofessors.com, the inter-dependancies of which classes are available when and how they relate to each other, which classes are already full (darn those kids who woke up at 5 am beat me to the good ones, sheesh!). Add to that I must take into consideration work scheduling and it all makes for quite a tedious and painful experience.
Once again my mind dreams up automated software solutions that could take in the preferences, desires, priorities, needs, goals, friends, and so forth and compute the best schedule for everyone. Such organizational algorithms must exist, right? This leads me into my next point.
We still do a lot of very tedious scheduling work manually every day. While we use technology to aid us in communicating and maintaining these schedules, we still tend to have a manual control over the actual choices. It’s like we’re still using automatic transmission vehicles when we could be using vehicles that drove themselves. In that same perspective, our organizational tools should go above and beyond, scheduling things on our behalf based on various relevant aspects pertinent to ourselves and those we are interacting with.
