The Chandler Project Blog

As promised, here is a more detailed analysis of how Chandler can help you reduce and simplify the information in your life.

Reducing sidebar organizational clutter: In Chandler, you get 9 different views of your data for every 1 Chandler collection you create.

• In the sidebar, you can generate 3 views of your data for every 1 collection you create. For example, rather than having a Home Calendar + Home Task List + All Home Stuff, you create 1 Home Collection and slice and dice it by navigating the Application Areas in the Toolbar.
• Within each collection, the 3 Triage Status sections give you 3 more ways to slice and dice each collection/application area.

Reducing duplication of information between your email, task list and calendar. In Chandler, you can:

• Manage calendar events as tasks in a list; and vice versa, you can
• Manage tasks by putting putting them on the calendar to mark important deadlines and milestones
• Address any item and send it out as an email

Reducing the # of information bits you generate by recycling your data with Triage Status, Tickler alarms and integrated Calendaring.

You can use and re-use your information items in Chandler by continuously editing and evolving a single item over time, even turn into a completely different kind of item.

Here’s a task to re-schedule a dentist appointment that turned into the new appointment on the calendar. This item originally started out as a confirmation email from my dentist, which I moved into Chandler and re-purposed as a reminder to re-schedule my appointment.

Sending, Editing and Re-Sending Email

With email, once you’ve sent a message, you can’t edit it anymore. Amendments can only be made by sending a new message. However, it’s not enough to just give people a way to keep editing a single item over time (which is what most task managers do).

Yet, one of the reasons email is so appealing is precisely because we can forget about everything that’s come before. Every new message is tabula rasa. There is a natural rhythmic cycle to work. We make a little bit of progress. We get stuck. We stop thinking about it for a while as the issue percolates in the nether regions of our brain or as we wait for someone else to get back to us. And then we pick it up again. In the meantime, email’s great at helping us “forget” about problems we can’t make progress on. The problem is, once you’ve lost something in email, it’s hard work to get it back.

Nevertheless, any effective alternative to email has to do a good job of disappearing and reappearing issues, in the right place, at the right time.

In Chandler, Triage Status allows you to forget about stuff (for a while) without losing it forever.

Instead of having a binary choice:

• Keep this in front of my face OR
• Lose it and forget about it forever…

You have 3 choices:

• Keep this in front of my face OR
• Keep this, but shove it off into LATER for now OR
• Lose it and forget about it because it’s DONE! or Obsolete.

You can move items in and out of your focus (NOW versus LATER) as many times as you need in order to finish the job. And if there are important deadline and milestone dates to remember, you can assign a Tickler Alarm or put the item on the Calendar and Chandler will re-focus the item for you on those dates.

Reducing duplication of information that is relevant to multiple contexts.

In Chandler, notes and events can appear in multiple collections. This means that events you and your spouse are attending together can appear as the same event on both of your calendars. Issues that need to be resolved for several projects can be tracked as the same note-item multiple project collections.

Tasks can show up in the context of a project collection and in a collection organized around a person, department or organization or a location (e.g. Things I need to discuss with Jan, HR stuff, or Home Office).

This allows you to organize your information in whatever way is most helpful to you without the up-keep of updating multiple versions of the same information.

Reduce the # of bits of information you exchange by Sharing.

This is somewhat self-explanatory. Instead of emailing back and forth, you could be editing the same lists, drafts, and meeting agendas with the people you work most closely with. When you need to alert people who aren’t sharing through Chandler, you can send (and re-send) the notes and events you’re working on via email.

These are some of the high-level design concepts. Stay tuned for a more specific scenario!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 7:31 am 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.