Chandler versus Email
June 16th, 2008 at 1:03 pm (5 months, 1 week ago) by Mimi Yin under How I Use ChandlerYou start out with a simple email. Perhaps notes from a meeting…
Hi!
Here are some of the issues we noted during out meeting.
- …
- …
- …
- …
It occurred to me that I actually have a number of questions about #2. Off the top of my head, some of them are:
- …
- …
- …
I’m sure I’ll think of more.
We also talked about looking into these options as possible ways to resolve ….
- …
- …
- …
- …
Unfortunately, I don’t know the status of …, does anybody else know? Should we look into this more?
Here are some other next actions that came out of the meeting:
- …
- …
- …
- …
Am I missing anything?
This 1 email might generate 15 separate threads of conversations.
People respond with:
- More open issues
- Questions about the open issues
- Questions about #2
- Answers to your question re: the status of …
- More next actions
- Status updates on next actions they’ve already started
- Stuff you forgot
You make progress as a group. But all of your work is buried in 1, 2, 3, 10 threads of emails.
Each message opens up more open issues to track, more questions to answer, more next actions to do.
You end up with dozens to hundreds of flagged email you need to react to in some way. But before you have a chance to reflect on what’s already been said, new information comes in.
By contrast, how might this work in Chandler?
You take the first message and you immediately break it down into separate items:
- List of open issues
- Spin out issue #2 because you already know you want to start up a list of questions about it that others can contribute to and perhaps answer.
- Possible options to resolve … becomes it’s own list
- Split out option … as it’s own item because like issue #2, you already have more information about aaa that you want to track.
- Each next action becomes its own item
Now, you and your group have a loosely structured space to fill in as you make progress on closing open issues, answering questions and completing next actions.
People can “respond” by:
- Adding more open issues to the open issues list.
- Spinning off issues as independent items as soon as they start working on resolving them
- Adding more questions to the questions about #2 item.
- Creating more next actions as they emerge.
- Update their status on next actions on the next action item itself.
In this way, Chandler allows you to “break apart” complex discussions into their component issues, questions, next actions and running lists so that as you progress (individually and as a group), you have a modicum of “organization” where you can create issue-centric places to collect and store ideas, thoughts, questions, status updates, etc. As a result, “discussion” about open issues happen on items dedicated defined around the issue, task, idea you’re grappling with, not mixed up in long email threads that cover a potpourri of topics relevant to the project.
That is the key difference between Chandler and Email.
Email collaboration unfolds around discussions, which can meander and bloom into unmanageable, tangled threads from which it becomes impossible to extract a “source of truth” about what’s actually going on.
In Chandler, collecting a list of open issues or questions becomes a shared task in a shared workspace where everyone can see and edit the same list.
June 16th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
This sounds great, but mustn’t Chandler add a wide variety of features to fully satisfy this use case? For example:
1. Rich text formatting to facilitate ordinals and lists like you mention.
2. Ability to hyperlink (or reference) other Chandler tasks (i.e., “Topic 2 has been broken into its own item, here: [insert link to new item]”).
3. Ability to assign tasks to other people (or claim them for yourself), if they’re true action items.
4. Versioning and history at the item level, to see who changed an item and when, and do diffs when necessary.
5. Ideally, explicit support for sub-tasks so a complex discussion that has been broken apart into its component issues can maintain a coherent structure that links the pieces back into a coherent whole (though hyperlinks to items could emulate this).
To really stand out as a process enabler, a few other features would be nice-to-haves:
Right now, it feels like the use cases you describe are possible, but only implicit in Chandler. Are there plans to incorporate more explicit support for such workflows, like what I describe above?
June 17th, 2008 at 10:33 am
I’m happy with having things remain implicit, to an extent. As has been mentioned in the mailing-list, a rich-text note area, with the ability to “link” to other items (and urls) would be a huge step up from what we already have.
Attachments are coming, or at least planned, which is another big step up.
Assignments, i’m not so sure about. You can do this by creating a shared collection, like “John Smiths Work To-Dos”, and people on the team, and yourself, can then put items into that collection which are assigned to you. You can also drag them into other peoples collections, if it is a shared task.
Supporting things implicitly rather then explicitly can offer greater flexibility, rather then baking it into the UI/Architecture…
June 17th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Hi Bryan
Thanks for writing up your thoughts.
I’m 100% with you that all of the features you describe would improve the experience in Chandler. 1, 2 and 3 (rich text, links, assign tasks) are filed as bugs. 4-8 (versioning, sub-tasks, templates, tags, rules) have been heavily discussed. #6 (templates) is interesting. We’ve discussed it more as allowing users to define their own item-kinds and attributes. But templates is probably an easier meme for people to understand. You can read more about #6 under “Chandler as a Platform” - http://chandlerproject.org/Projects/NutshellCartoons#ChandlerModel
However, this particular post is about usage patterns that I’ve observed first-hand or that users have described in detailed write-ups to the Users List. In other words, it’s how people are using Chandler today.
What’s emerged since the Preview release is that even though other applications have different sub-sets of the functionality you describe (email has #s 1,2,7,8 and wikis have all but #s 3 and 5) very few are well suited to do the kind of “list management” described here.
So with Chandler, we’ve been primarily focused on Triage (with Tickler Alarms) and an integrated Calendar to first address the the simple, yet intractable problem of “how to keep track” of “volatile information” (ever-changing, ever-expanding pile of ideas, issues, and deadlines)…and in particular, “how to keep track” of ever-changing lists that many different people contribute to and need access to.
I realize that what’s worked for some people won’t necessarily work for others. But for our Preview users, Chandler’s Triage and Calendar capabilities have proven to be more central to managing their information than rich text, sub-tasks, and tags.
So yes, I agree! There’s lots more to do and we hope to build an active developer community around making Chandler’s list management workflows more robust.
However, I’m unsure about fully satisfying user needs (if you mean it in some objective sense). My personal feeling is that such a question can only yield highly personal and therefore highly variable responses depending on who you talk to. Instead, the way I think about what Chandler can accomplish is: Is it a competitive solution? Does it improve on what people are doing today? For those who have written in with their success stories, the answer is yes!
Mimi
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Nobody should set out to design a software that meets everyone’s need - she will die of exhaustion before anything comes to fruition. Chandler should first try to bring one major improvement to the current PIM market that most people would appreciate, then move on to the next. I am very tempted to try Chandler, after reading that it allows one email to be broken into threads: can it collapse, as well as expand, though? in other words, once it is broken into threads, can I still trace it back to the original email, with all the threads shown? that would be good. However, I am not diving into Chandler so fast because the website still does not explain clearly to new users how it will work. e.g. if I download the desktop, can I use my existing email accounts in yahoo and gmail in it, and does sharing / collaboration require everyone to install / join the Hub?
July 14th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Hi Chiu Ying,
You can use your exisiting email accounts with Chandler. More instructions here.
Chandler Hub is just a service you sign up for. But you can gain full access shared collections on Hub without signing up for an account. Again more instructions here.
You can access the Get Started Guide from the Product Tour: http://chandlerproject.org/tour
As for collapsing threads back together. Currently, it is not supported in the app. However, it’s definitely high on many people’s feature lists. We had a lot of design discussions around various ways to implement such functionality. Here is a bug for a first step towards realizing “linking items together into threads”: https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11822
Best,
Mimi