The Chandler Project Blog

Lately, a number of users have asked about auto-filling in Chandler on the Users-List. Rule-based filtering is an email feature many people can’t live without and it’s definitely something we’d like to see in the product.

Then, I came across Chris Brogan’s How I tamed my inbox. I’ve seen write-ups like this before, but this post really resonates with how Chandler is meant to be useful as a companion to email. Namely: Get important stuff out of email into a trusted system that has better affordances for managing the things you need to do. Chris Brogan’s trusted system consists of a lightweight filing system, a to-do list/project manager (Things) and a calendar (Google Calendar).

With Chandler, you get the to-do-list and calendar in one, integrated package

To quote Chris:

If any of my projects are time specific, I put that information into Google Calendar. I then set up the reminders along the way. Further, if the project is large or lengthy, I set up little milestone time frames such that I will remember to work periodically on projects all the way up to their due date.

Takeaways: Nothing gets done in a single sitting. The ability to see to-dos on a calendar is critical.

I have notes and details on a new conference I’m launching for marketers for September in the Boston area.

Takeaway: Keeping track of “notes about what I need to do” is just as important as keeping track of what I need to do.

However, I haven’t seen much discussion of sharing as a way to deal with “email overload”. Instead, too-much-email is most often portrayed as a personal information management problem.

Yet, email is first and foremost a communication tool, a way for groups to collaborate. If there’s a problem with email, it’s a group information management problem.

Ergo, sharing is very relevant to “email overload”. In addition to helping people deal with “too much email”, we can and should also be looking for ways to:

1. Reduce the amount of email we send and receive by restructuring the way information is disseminated and developed over time; and
2. Reduce the amount of time we spend managing email by sharing and distributing the work of putting information into the right contexts. (Only 1 person should ever have to do the work of putting things onto the right task lists and calendars!)

To be clear, I’m not saying that the solution is as simple as: Don’t email, just share! The point I’d like to make is more precise: Sharing is an important part of how we fix email, provided we don’t create yet another collaboration medium that simply generates more email!

Chandler attempts to walk this line and while there is always more work to do, we’ve already seen success in reducing email for our users. I will follow up with a more detailed blog post on how you can “Send less email” and “Spend less time managing email” with Chandler.

Tags: Collaboration, Email, Sharing

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Product Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.