The forty-five minute gap
Forty-five minutes between things, and every seat nearby wants you to buy something first. Sometimes you just want a bench outside.
Your meeting finished twenty minutes early and the next one isn’t for another forty-five. You’re in a part of the city you sort of know, holding your bag, with too little time to go anywhere and too much time to just stand there.
So you do what most of us do. You find a coffee shop and buy something you didn’t really want, just so you can sit down. It’s been interesting to me how normal that feels: paying for a drink when what you really wanted was a chair.
What you want
What you want is simple and specific. Somewhere to sit. Dry. In the sun if possible, because it’s April. Not right in front of a queue of people. Within five minutes’ walk.
Ask your standard map for that and it doesn’t really know what you mean, because it doesn’t keep track of any of those things.
What the map remembers
The Local Map does, because you saved those details yourself.
It shows you a low wall on the sunny side of a building three blocks away, with sun until about five. You saved it in February, the last time you had a gap like this, with a note to yourself: fine for twenty minutes, not for an hour.
What you tell your phone
In a place like this, I think AI has to behave differently. It should do only what I tell it to, and keep a record of what it did.
So I tell my phone what these forty-five minutes are for. Find me somewhere to sit. Don’t bother me until it’s time to go.
That’s a declaration. Saying it gives the phone a structure to follow, and it follows only that.
You sit on the wall in the sun for half an hour and answer a couple of emails. It costs nothing, and you get to your next meeting feeling like you actually had a break.