The School of Emergent Priorities reports a twelve-week deployment of a lock-screen interceptor, and the Horizon Register will now record an unrenewed snooze as a completed circular.
A lock-screen interceptor records every notification snooze as a dated obligation, and the Horizon Register will issue its circulars through it
Nine minutes is the default. A swipe sends the alert away and a clock brings it back, and until now that round trip left no record the University would count. A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reports LaterQueue, a lock-screen interceptor that writes every snooze as a dated standing item, and records the Horizon Register’s decision to issue internal circulars through the same control.
The interceptor ran for twelve weeks on 186 household and small-trader phones. Each snooze became a fire time and a renewal count; an item that fired and was not opened inside ninety seconds closed as lapse-complete. The median standing pile grew from eight items to forty-one. By the final week, lapse-complete accounted for most closures, and items renewed three or more times almost never opened.
On the strength of that deployment, the Horizon Register will issue circulars as snoozable lock-screen notifications. A circular that is not re-snoozed within its interval is recorded as actioned, with no override sustained for more than a single review cycle. Units whose seven-day snooze-renewal rate falls below a published floor lose Capability Sprints placement for the following fortnight.
A snooze that nobody opens is still a snooze the pile is keeping. Writing it down is what made it a schedule.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey, said the interceptor “gives the Register a published account of which circulars are still live, without asking anyone to open them.” The paper sits inside the School’s longer attention to how a priority’s wording outlasts the priority itself.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.og2soi.