I’m one of those people who uses their email inbox as a task list. I keep emails around forever if I think there’s something I need to do associated with that email. I file messages I think I might refer to one day out of my inbox. Unfortunately, this approach sometimes means I have a lot of email threads all clamoring for my attention. It can be overwhelming.

One of Chandler’s appeals for me is the ability to manage lots of different ideas, but only focus on a few at a time. The way focus works in Chandler is that items are “triaged” to NOW, LATER, or DONE.

DONE is just like filing an email. NOW is like leaving the email in my inbox. The big enhancement, for me, is LATER.

With the LATER section, you can mark a message as important to pay attention to, but not right now. This risks becoming a gargantuan pit of “someday, maybe” items, though, so you can also assign an alarm, and that item will pop back to NOW in the future.

Now I can choose just a few things to keep in my NOW section, and collapse the LATER and DONE sections so they don’t distract me.

One big problem with the LATER section, until recently, was that it was sorted pretty arbitrarily. I have dozens of LATER items. Birthdays, events months from now, reminders to do something next month, and more. What I (and most users, from what we’ve heard on our mailing lists) want is for the LATER section to sort according to when an item will become NOW again.

I’m happy to announce that in our latest release (1.0rc1), the LATER section sorts appropriately! For all you non-Chandler users reading this, that may not seem like a big deal. But it has a surprisingly big impact on my use of Chandler.

When LATER sorted arbitrarily, I spent a lot of my time going and looking at my calendar to remind myself if I had upcoming events. Really, I don’t have enough events to want a calendar view very often. Mostly, I just want to know what’s coming soon. Now the LATER section gives me that.

I used to not bother assigning alarms to events. I’m not sure why, it just felt like too much effort for not enough payoff. Being able to see a prioritized-by-date list of LATER items pushes the effort-to-payoff ratio to a point where I’m always assigning alarms to anything I don’t want to think about right now. As a result, my NOW section is much more manageable and I’m calmer about what I need to be thinking about.