What makes a Task a Task?
February 14th, 2008 at 4:36 am (2 months, 4 weeks ago) by Mimi Yin under Product DesignWe’ve decided to remove the notion of Task entirely from Chandler and add the notion of a ‘Star’.
The Star isn’t so much a replacement for Tasks. Tasks are nouns, they are a Kind of item, like Notes, Messages and Events. By contrast, the Star is simply an adjective, a way to describe Note, Message and Event items, similar to Triage Status. Below is a discussion of how we arrived at this decision.
One of the more common pieces of feedback we get from users who use Chandler daily is:
I have trouble figuring out how to use the ‘Add to Task list’ button at the top of the item details. I take this to mean: I have trouble figuring out when to call something a Task.
This dilemma is a reflection of how information work has evolved. More and more, the distinction between a task or todo and the substance of the task itself (ideas, thinking, writing) has becoming increasingly blurred and it’s unclear that it helps people to expend a lot of energy drawing that distinction.
I believe this is why for many people, text files, outliners, paper notebooks and email are generally preferred over more structure task / project management tools. None of these things require you to decide what’s a task and what’s a thought about a task.
If you want to maintain a list of “Ideas for new charter for company blog”, is that just a note-to-self? Or is it a task? It depends on how you choose to frame it: “Brainstorm ideas for new charter for company blog” (Task) or “Ideas for new charter for company blog” (Note).
What about “Write up proposal for new charter for company blog” versus “Proposal for new charter for company blog” The first is a task. The second is the substance of the task: the proposal itself. At the end of the day, both amount to the same thing.
For more details about what this conceptual change means for the user interface, see:
- Chandler-Dev list proposal for a ‘Pared down UI’
- Bug 11771 to change the Task Stamp to the Star Stamp.
February 14th, 2008 at 6:18 am
While I’m not going to comment on whether or not removing the tasks feature is a good idea, I do think this is a poor way to communicate these two ideas.
This still shows a bit of circular reasoning. You can’t say you’re going to remove tasks but add stars in the same sentence without meaning that you’re replacing tasks with stars. Then in the next sentence you say that stars aren’t replacements for tasks. Which is it? I do understand your thought process here, regardless of whether I agree with it, but the communication of that thought process is lacking in clarity.
If you want to get rid of tasks then say: “We’ve decided to be improve the usability of our product we will be removing the tasks feature.” Then separately in a post not devoted to tasks, mention you’ll be adding the star feature. You can’t have it both ways. It can’t be a replacement and not a replacement at the same time.
February 14th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Does it really matter what you call IT?
IT has to get done, doesn’t it?
February 15th, 2008 at 11:10 am
This just brings me back to some all the bloggers writing obits for this project. “No decision is ever final. Time and again, the Chandler team hashes out compromises on complex issues, only to hit reset when someone new joins the project with new ideas or when it turns out that someone wasn’t really satisfied with the compromise.”
http://gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html
As someone else states on another blog:
“I was a big fan of Chandler when it first started and avidly followed the mailing lists and announcements. I tried it out a few times too, in its early incarnations. I lost interest though when web 2.0 came along and apps like Google Calendar and Zimbra actually delivered working products that did pretty much what Chandler was promising, albeit on a smaller scale.”
http://web-kita.com/2008/01/30/chandler-no-version-10-after-7-years-can-it-survive-post-kapor/
In my case that would be Google Calendar, RTM, Grand Central, Jott, Thunderbird/Lightning.
February 15th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Alan,
Yes, we’ve all read the obits. The first quote you mention describes a problem the project faced 4-5 years ago, whereas the changes Mimi discusses in this blog post were inspired by user feedback. I tend to think that using feedback to make the product better is a sign of a healthy project.
Glad to hear you’ve found a solution that works for you with the products you listed.
February 16th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Google refers to tasks as “completable events.” It looks like tasks will be added to Google Calendar in the near future, for what it’s worth. Outlook already supports tasks. I think the name “tasks” is around to stay, and as calendar interop picks up speed, it might be best to stick to that name, whatever its faults.
May 6th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
The decision to banish “tasks” (at least for the foreseeable future) from Chandler continues to puzzle me. It seems to me that tasks might have been removed primarily to help guard against any impression entering a user’s mind that Chandler is (or aspires to be) a super-duper task manager/PIM. The goal, I think, is to manage user expectations about support for advanced task management and PIM features. Assuming all of this (or not), it seems to me a similar effect could have been achieved by merely turning down the formality volume setting by simply renaming “tasks” to “to dos”. Events, to dos, and notes to self are no more difficult to understand conceptually than they were when implemented by the Daytimer Company with high-priced papyrus and charcoal stubby. If new users were having such problems with “tasks” in Chandler, I really doubt “tasks” were the problem. Speaking from experience, after you have accumulated 1,000+ items in Chandler, sifting (sorting, organizing, searching, etc.) them is (and hopefully will remain) aided by the ability to view Chandler items by kind (that is, events, starred items (furtively used as tasks), notes, and messages). After using Chandler with starred items now, I believe shoehorning starred items into Chandler at the expense of tasks/to dos was a net loss of functionality for all users. I look forward to their return.