The Chandler Project Blog

Chandler has gotten a lot of attention because of its association with David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology.

That was part of our “Be all things to all people.” past.

2 years ago, we started the long process of paring down our goals and zeroing in on a single focus so that we could deliver a 1.0 product. GTD is not our single focus. Supporting knowledge work is. (Blog post coming soon.)

This doesn’t mean Chandler is somehow the anti-thesis of GTD. Given the overlap in problem space, I imagine that as we pursue our single-minded goal, Chandler will continue to improve for GTD practitioners as well.

We also welcome and will actively help volunteers who want to write a GTD plug-in. Come find us on the Chandler Development List!

However, many of our users already find Chandler to be useful for practicing GTD today. They define collections around the GTD projects list and @contexts, use the Dashboard collection as a centralized Collection Box and assign ticklers and calendar dates.

For these users, Chandler is still a better tool for GTD than say Palm or Paper, the original David Allen GTD tools.

Some of the features our GTD users have put to good use include: 

• The ability to organize items into multiple collections means you can have next actions live in multiple contexts and you can organize next actions by project *and* by context.
• Chandler’s integrated calendar and list views mean tasks you’ve put on your calendar can still show up on your next action lists as scheduled tasks or events.
• Sharing! Not something covered in GTD, but Chandler helps you implement GTD as a household or a workgroup.

Still, Chandler shouldn’t be construed as an implementation of the GTD methodology or any other methodology for that matter. We don’t believe software can teach systems the way David Allen can. 

Chandler also can’t teach users how to turn Goals into Next Actions or even to appreciate that there is a difference between the two. These are things people need 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.”

This is consistent with user feedback we’ve received that the GTD label actually scares people away. Even though there isn’t any GTD terminology in Chandler, people who knew about Chandler’s past association with GTD assumed they needed to subscribe to a particular way of doing things in order to succeed with the product.

Tags: GTD

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Product Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.