Peter Allen blogged recently about his experiences using Chandler:

I started using the Chandler Project a while back and I really liked it. It gives you tickler alarms for things you need to do plus a space for notes. So instead of a calendar where once the date is past, the event is gone, it’s a recurring reminder. It’s like a Jack Russel Terrrier, always jumping around and wanting attention. And every little thing can get recorded in its entries so when the reminder goes off, the appropriate info is at your fingertips.

Depending on who you talk to, a piece of software that reminds you of a Jack Russell Terrier could either be very good, or very bad That aside, Peter’s post is a pretty succinct articulation of what’s unique about Reminders and Calendar Dates in Chandler. Alerts that pop up once work well for reminding you to do “2-minute” tasks like “Take your pills” or “Go to meeting”.

But reminders to start working on persistent, long-term projects like “Work on proposal for…” or “Come up with questions for…” fail miserably if they simply appear and disappear. Instead, setting “reminder dates” needs to work hand-in-hand with a way to manage your focus over long stretches of time. Chandler accomplishes this by not only providing “short-term” alerts in the form of pop-up dialogs, but by also using reminder and event dates to automatically re-focus notes and events into your list of “NOW” items. By contrast, a solution that worked more like a Jack Russell Terrier might be one that keeps popping up reminder dialogs every 5-10 minutes until you finish the task, but perhaps I betray my personal feelings about Jack Russells.

The following screenshot was taken from the Chandler Product Tour:

Unfortunately, Peter ran into performance issues:

Alas, the software is still too slow for me.

But, he did add the caveat:

If you have a fast machine, it’s worth checking out.

We recognize that poor performance is a deal-breaker for many people who have tried to use Chandler and we’re addressing it as part of a major re-architecture project. Still, it’s nice to see that some of these “harder to quantify” features of Chandler are proving to be of use!