Full Disclosure: I am the product designer on the Chandler Project and I wasn’t sure if my role on the project disqualifies me from making any claims about how I find Chandler useful. Yet, truth-be-told, while designing Chandler, I had all kinds of theories about how people would find the application useful. But actually using Chandler day-to-day is completely different from theoretical usage. Anyhow, here is my experience of Chandler, personal biases and all

Expect to hear more stories from others soon!

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My husband Alex and I travel back and forth between San Francisco and New York about once a month. Life gets complicated pretty quickly. For one, you never seem to have what you need in the right place.

We used to try and remind each other of things we needed to bring by emailing a packing list to each other. It was hard because inevitably, over the course of a month, new things would crop up. Tax forms, receipts to file expense reports, new super-duper floss from the dentist, gift for Mother’s Day, hiking boots! We’d end up with a lot of emails, each one with a different subset of what we actually needed to bring. Too often, we’d resort to texting and shouting things across the room as well. Inevitably, important things got left on the wrong coast.

Now, we have a shared Home collection in Chandler. We have lots of stuff in there. Everything from drafts of emails we need to send out to recurring bills and lists of questions for our accountant.

One of the more useful things we share is a packing list for our monthly migration. We just keep reusing the same list. We just keep amending it and cycling back and forth between the NOW and LATER sections. The list has now also expanded to include a checklist for the handful of shut-down and chuck-out tasks we need to do to make sure we don’t run up heating bills and start a mold farm in the fridge while we’re gone.

Having this “living packing list” has made the whole process a lot more efficient for us because much of the stuff stays the same from trip to trip: Clean out the fridge, move the car so that it’s behind the neighbors’ car (we have tandem parking), bring airplane headphones, netflix movies!, check into flight and print out boarding passes, etc.

However, we also always manage to have a list of things that change from trip to trip. For the past 3 months, we’ve been hauling tax return paraphernalia back and forth; each trip, swearing we’d be done with it once and for all. We’re still hauling. We’re each responsible for adding these “special-case” items to the list. No more, “But I told you 3x to remember that!” And best of all, no more texts and emails flying around that need to be tracked and collated.

Whenever I add something to the list, the packing list pops to the top of Alex’s NOW section so he sees my change. The same is true vice versa. So we’re also kept aware of the changes we’re each making.

The other problem with our email lists was that there was never a good place to “put them”. Sometimes, we just plain forgot to consult the list.

In Chandler, we’ve figured out ways to make the packing list show up automatically at the right time.

For example, once I know the dates for our flights, I’ll add an alarm to the packing list so that it pops into NOW for both of us the day of our flight. Or, I’ll put the packing list right on the calendar along with our flight information. Either way, we run into the list when we go looking for flight info.

The packing list isn’t the only list we’ve developed this process for. We have a running “present ideas” list. All those holidays, birthdays, wedding and baby showers! We keep track of preset ideas for friends and family and we keep track of what we’ve already given people…so we don’t inadvertently re-gift to the same person! The “gifts-given” list is also useful for re-using ideas for other people. I mean, how many different baby shower gifts can a person come up with anyway!

We have similar lists for thank you notes and stuff to buy. We keep 2 separate lists for “Household Projects”, one for each coast. They usually languish in the LATER section, but periodically, I’ll put an alarm on one of them so that it will pop into NOW the next time we’re on that coast.

This all sounds very organized of us. But we’ve never done anything like this before. Somehow, whenever we’ve tried to maintain lists like this with Excel or on his Palm Pilot, we’d give up after a while because it was too hard keep it up to date and inevitably, we’d end up with mis-matched duped information in email or on his Outlook calendar.

I’m using Chandler for work as well, but for a long while, the Home scenario was the only one I had working. Figuring out clever ways to use it for personal stuff helped me wrap my head around how I could use it for work. Not everything translates, but a lot of it is remarkably similar, but I’ll leave that for a separate post.