The Chandler Project Blog

In Part 1 of this post, I described the dilemma we face in the design, trying to balance “avoiding the futility of time management” with a need to keep the LATER section somewhat under control.

In Part 2, I will walk you through some of the discussions we’ve had on the list and my reasoning for not going down the path of providing more granular LATER sub-sections defined around time.

With users piping up about how their LATER sections were becoming unmanageable, we revived discussions around adding LATER sub-sections defined around loose timeframes:

• LATER-Next week
• LATER-In 2 weeks
• LATER-This month, etc…

and improving the sub-sort order so that items in LATER are ordered by when they’re going to happen:

• “LATER-Imminently”
• “LATER-Far in the future”
• “LATER-No date at all”

The latter (improve sub-sort) was always part of the design and is on the short list of bugs to fix after we ship 1.0.

But I worry about going down the path of more granualar LATER sub-sections. I worry about falling into the trap of over-planning, over-emphasizing the importance of defining timeframes and inadvertently pushing users to assign dates they have no intention of holding themselves to, which again, results in big piles of items getting dumped into NOW when they’re not ready to deal with them.

Instead, I think it will be more effective to automatically collect all LATER items that don’t have a specified time frame (items with no alarm, no event dates) into a separate section called “LATER – No date assigned”.*

This smaller, hopefully more manageable “LATER-No date assigned” section acts as a reminder that there are deferred items that need to be reviewed and re-evaluated on a regular basis because they’re not going to magically re-appear in NOW on their own.

To make this list even smaller, we could provide a “LATER-Not really” option for items we create for peace of mind, but actually have no intention of doing, ever.

*Being an open source project that supports plugins means that of course doesn’t stop anybody from implementing an add-on for more granular LATER sub-sections. What I’m discussing here is the out of the box experience.

Tags: Design, Productivity, Task Management

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 9:21 am 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.