In Chandler, nothing is ever overdue - Part 1 of 2
March 11th, 2008 at 2:36 pm (2 months ago) by Mimi Yin under Product DesignThis intentionally provocative statement could be construed as self-defeating, given our goal to help people be more productive. Presumably, part of being more productive is actually meeting your deadlines.
But “deadlines” are one of the big downers of task managers because they are overused and misused, applied to everything as if everything could be managed in terms of time.
You enter a task. You studiously assign timeframes: deadlines, start dates and alarms. The dates are often meaningless, but you fear that if you don’t, you’ll completely forget about it. Then, when the dates roll around, you end up with a big pile of overdue tasks. You clearly cannot deal with all of them now and you still don’t have a good way to ensure that you won’t forget about them. So instead, you constantly carry around the baggage of a long list of overdue tasks. Oftentimes, overdue tasks turn into moot tasks. Stuff you never got to and then it was too late and well, looks like it wasn’t really that important. (This is perhaps the most common reason people give for why they just don’t need a task manager.) But when you first thought of the task, it would have been like pulling teeth to admit that, so you dutifully entered it and set a due date anyway.
Trying to guestimate when you’ll actually do things and how long it will take you and by when you’ll have them done, aka time management is an exercise in futility…as far as “knowledge work” is concerned.
It’s absolutely essentialy for things like dentist appointments and paying your rent. But the benefits are less clear for tasks that start with verbs like Brainstorm…Look into…Evaluate…Think about…Follow up on…
This is not to say that there aren’t hard deadlines for the end-goal of all your Brainstorming and Looking into.
And a “responsible” person would leave themselves plenty of time to brainstorm before the product of that brainstorm needs to be handed in as a concrete deliverable. But the reality is, trying to quantify how much brainstorming (3 hours) you need to do and when you’re going to do it (2 days before the write up is due) is an exercise in futility.
Which is why many people don’t bother trying to record and track these random one-off thoughts in any kind of an organized system (unless you count email as organized.) Instead, they’re strewn across desks on little bits of paper, desktops in text files, emails, sticky notes, napkins and last but not least, your brain.
The problem for a growing number of people is, there is too much of this “stuff” to keep track of in your head and still no good way to keep track of them outside of your head. Traditional task management solutions designed for “concrete” tasks are too structured. Not very structured solutions like paper notebooks and text files are well, not very structured.
Chandler attempts to walk the line by offering just enough structure to get you “organized enough” without imposing so much structure that managing the solution becomes a task in and of itself.
“Avoiding the futility of time management” is precisely why the LATER section in Chandler does not offer more granularity. It was intentionally missing options for designating more granular sub-sections like Tomorrow, Next Week, in 2 Weeks. You can always assign alarms to items so that they automatically pop back into NOW on a particular date. But unless you have a very specific date in mind, the idea is that really, you have no idea when you’re going around to thinking about this again.
On the other hand, we have seen that users quickly accumulated so much stuff in LATER that they begin to see the LATER section as a black hole. If you want to forget about something, put it in LATER.
In Part 2 of this post, I will get go into more detail about how we might reconcile these two opposing forces in the user experience.
March 12th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
On February 8, 2008 Katie posted a message in the blog that discussed the fact that “We are not trying to be a GTD specific tool.” (OSAF’s Next Steps: http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2008/02/06/osafs-next-steps/ ), and yet GTD keeps coming up both in description of methodology and in references to blogs that discuss Chandler.
For example, on March 5 you posted a link to Eugene Kim’s blog post on Chandler (One user’s take on Chandler: http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2008/03/05/one-users-take-on-chandler/ ). You describe that Eugene’s post “effectively articulates what Chandler is to him.” In his post Eugene says that “At its core, Chandler is a task manager in the spirit of DavidAllen’s GettingThingsDone methodology.”
Most recently (the post I am responding to), you describe a methodology of dealing with non-Calendar items that is right out of GTD.
Unfortunately, it seems that the Chandler team is intent on re-inventing the wheel, only not as well. I’ve seen discussion of Chandler’s development being guided by observations of “how people really work.” If that is the guiding principle, the team might as well give up, because most people really work in a fog of undefined tasks and projects.
Does the Chandler team have a task/project/knowledge management system that is superior to GTD? If so, I’d like to see it. As it stands, most people I’ve introduced Dhandler to really don’t get it. And now we are going to have Tasks become Stars?
GTD is an elegant and fairly all-encompassing system. A significant number of people have invested a significant amount of time and resources to teach and/or learn GTD. A ready-made target audience that is crying out for the type of workflow control that Chandler could offer, if it only allowed them to go all the way.
By ignoring that audience, the Chandler Project sets itself a dual challenge. Challenge 1 is acceptance of its software. Challenge 2 is to educate people on the Chandler approach. Success at Challenge 1 is dependent on successful completion of Challenge 2.
Why not change the project’s priorities slightly? Why not skip Challenge 2 altogether by giving the GTD crowd a tool they can use right away (right now implementation of GTD in Chandler is so convoluted that most don’t even try)?
Chandler needs to reach a critical mass in adoption if it is to succeed. At this rate, this critical mass will not be reached before funding and energy run out.
If you do want to introduce a different, non-GTD way of approaching workflows, do it once you’ve achieved mass acceptance. Your adoption curve under the current roadmap is simply not practical. Too many convoluted concepts buried under even more convoluted terminology, spell failure.
Should Chandler wish to address the GTD crowd, there is virtually no competition out there. You have a wide-open field, particularly if you can address the question of collaborative GTD (look at the success of Wrike which is a stone-age tool compared to the capabilities of Chandler/Cosmo).
Many GTD afficionados are rooting for Chandler and we are ready to adopt it. I hope you will reconsider the current roadmap of ignoring GTD in favor of some nebulous workflow management philosophy that will only extend the disappointment many of us feel who have been following Chandler since its inception.
RP
March 14th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Hi Randall,
GTD is one of many reasonable paths Chandler could have taken. Other software projects have chosen it. But a full-on implementation of GTD is not how we’re framing our focus.
Nevertheless, you are in good company in wanting a GTD version of Chandler. As an open source project, there is always the write-a-plugin path to getting what you want, so feel free to start up a conversation on the Chandler Development List. I’m sure others will pipe up to help.
Meanwhile, we already have users who are successfully using Chandler to practice GTD. In many ways, Chandler is still better for GTD than the Palm OS or paper, the original GTD tools. (I will be blogging about this shortly.) Others have found their own ways to use Chandler. You can follow their progress on the Users-List.
As for whether Chandler is trying to push it’s own methodology, we’re not. In our experience, software that subscribes to a methodology scares users away. For us, the GTD label has both helped and hurt us. Instead, we’re simply committed to helping people work more effectively without trying to change behavior. (More to come on this topic as well.)
In the end, as software, Chandler can’t teach or force users to follow a system. Chandler also can’t teach people how to turn a fog of goals and requirements into concrete next actions or even make people appreciate that there’s a difference between the two! Those are things each person needs to come to terms with on their own, in their own way.
As Rick Rawson explained on the Users List:
“I am finding that Chandler does not organize my life. It only helps ME organize my life. And that takes time and work. There are any number of different strategies within Chandler that can be used to be sure I don’t forget all those “things” to “research” and “think about.” None of those methods is magic; all require MY brain and my time. I have to take the time to figure out what works for ME in MY context and with MY personality and deficiencies. What I like about Chandler is that it provides me with some tools so that I can devise my own solutions.”
Mimi