The Chandler Project Blog

One scenario Chandler can be useful for is pulling together meeting agendas and maintaining a log of meeting notes.

Meetings are the perfect example of how calendaring and task management are inextricably intertwined. It is a problem area that highlights Chandler’s ability to cross boundaries and integrate information by letting you manage events from a task list and vice versa, manage tasks with a calendar.

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Many organizations rely heavily on email for coordinating meetings: to schedule them, collect ideas for the agenda and disseminate meetings notes.

Emails fly back and forth…which means the ‘final list’ of agenda items always needed to be manually collated by somebody. This sometimes involves sifting through a dozen or so emails.

After the meeting is over, notes need to be written up and sent out. Sometimes a wiki is used to create an accessible log of meeting minutes.

Anyone wanting to read those notes needs to either sift through email or try find the notes by navigating the wiki.

By contrast, in Chandler, the same thing can be done with a single event item that:

• Represents the meeting on the calendar;
• Can be managed as a task, both when preparing for the meeting and follow-up with meeting notes;
• Functions as a “shared workspace” for brainstorming agenda items and logging notes.

For example, if you have a daily check-in meeting on the calendar. Anyone can add agenda items from the calendar or the Triage List. Each person can see the agenda items others have already added. You have what amounts to a shared, asynchronous “whiteboard” where you can brainstorm without having to be in the same room.

As the agenda begins to take shape, the meeting event can be sent from Chandler as an email invitation.

When it’s time for the meeting to start, the event drops into the top of the NOW section with the agenda right in the notes field.

During the meeting, notes can be taken right in the meeting event, which can then be re-sent via email, now updated with notes from the meeting.

Others wanting to get caught up on the daily check-ins can simply browse the calendar from Chandler Desktop or Chandler Hub on the web.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 9:54 am and is filed under How I Use Chandler. 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.