JumpStarter: Getting Started on Personal Goals with AI-Powered Context Curation

Everyone aspires to achieve personal goals. However, getting started is often complex and daunting, especially for large projects. AI has the potential to create plans and help jumpstart progress, but it often lacks sufficient personal context to be useful. We introduce JumpStarter, a system that uses AI-powered context curation to create action plans and draft personalized working solutions. JumpStarter assists users by posing questions to elicit relevant context, breaking down goals into manageable steps, and selecting appropriate context to draft working solutions for each step. A technical evaluation indicates that context curation results in plans and working solutions of higher quality. A user study demonstrates that compared to ChatGPT, JumpStarter significantly reduces users' mental load and increases their efficiency in kickstarting personal projects. We discuss the design implications of AI-powered context curation to facilitate the use of generative AI in complex problem-solving.