In the early days of free e-mail accounts, I lived in a close-knit rural community. My close friends and I thought e-mail was the best thing ever invented, and we’d make all sorts of plans entirely by e-mail. What could be more simple and effective? It turned out almost anything.

While my closest friends all checked their e-mail hourly, many of my other friends had work that wasn’t sitting in front of a computer. Many of them got e-mail accounts only grudgingly, and checked them maybe weekly. I was constantly wasting time expecting people to have read my email proposals. Eventually, I learned that I had to kill trees if I wanted people to hear what I had to say.

Applications, even paradigm shifting applications, are only useful if you use them. Obvious though this may be, it’s critical in determining whether a tool is valuable in practice.

In my day to day use of Chandler, I often close the application down and forget to open it up again. When I want to go check whether I can schedule an event, or find some other specific piece of information, I go and load Chandler, no sweat. But when I have an idea or something I need to remember to do, I often just create an (electronic) sticky or emacs file or send an email to myself to track it.

This is a hassle! I love Chandler’s organization of my calendar, random thoughts, and tasks, especially the ability to set something to come back to my attention later. But I’m not getting us much advantage from this as I’d like, because I still have so many tasks not in Chandler. The truth is, I don’t need all that organizational power most of the time. Often, I’d just like to quickly jot down a task.

To make it easier for everyone in my position to add tasks to their Chandler collections, today we’re announcing Chandler Quick Entry for iGoogle. OK, maybe this doesn’t make anything easier for Nepalese babies. But hopefully it’ll be helpful for people who use Chandler Hub and iGoogle.

If your homepage is set to Google and you’ve never used iGoogle before, it’s worth a look. You can quickly add a few gadgets with blog feeds, news, or whatever else you’re into. And, now, you can create notes and quickly send them to Chandler Hub. If you use Chandler Desktop to sync your hub collections, your new note will appear in Chandler the next time it’s open and syncs.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

 [Note: at the moment, you can’t use Google’s Directory to add the gadget, the directory contains an old, non-functional version of the gadget.  You need to click on the image above to successfully add.]