…Though I’ve had little time to compose a proper intro email, I do want to say that I think Chandler is GREAT. I’m an original user of Lotus Agenda, and someone who cursed the decision to discontinue it many years ago when I worked for a medium sized company where everyone in management used it religiously. We kept it going as long as we could, years after it was discontinued, even into Windows desktop environments, so that’s how much everyone loved it. I’ve been on the lookout for a similar tool ever since. I’ve used Lotus Notes, Lotus Organizer, MS Outlook with Exchange, Mindjet, the Brain, and numerous others. I usually give each tool a good couple of months before I give up on it and some I’ve used for years. I have an incredibly busy job and life with a million things to attend to and really need to stay organized.

Two years ago I read Getting Things Done and started adopting that methodology into organizing my life. I got wind of Chandler development and downloaded very early versions which were way too early and caused my desktop to crash regularly. I came back around again this winter after about 18 months of using Mindjet MindManager (also a very good product especially when used in conjunction with Gyronix ResultsManager), but cha-ching - buying both is out of the reach of the average user. Also, though it helped me because I tend to be very visually oriented, it was too difficult to get quick “at a glance” results, and ultimately a bit too complicated overall. Also there was no option for any sort of web interface, which I think in this day and age is essential.

So, I decided to give Chandler another try.

(Now here is where, in the words of another user, Laura “pinpoints Chandler’s core value proposition.”)

“The single greatest thing about [Chandler] is the core idea of the confluence of tasks, emails, and appointments as simple items which can interact and be managed with one other. It is SO TRUE that separating these items into hard categories with totally different interfaces makes organization more, not less, difficult. Allowing them to be listed and managed together is a huge leap forward. It has definitely already added value to my life.”

So thanks to everyone working hard on this project - your efforts are paying off! You have built something extremely useful and I look forward to hanging around to see where it goes. I will try to compose an email in the near future with some specific thoughts/ideas/suggestions about the product which I hope you might find useful. In the meantime I will continue to use it in my daily life and be grateful to all you hard working folks.

The following screenshot was taken from the Chandler Product Tour:

User Andre Mueninghoff has already been making use of this new feature for a few weeks now, helping us track down bugs and providing feedback. Here are 2 uses he’s found so far:

Andre keeps two items open all the time in separate windows:

The first is something he calls a “Bucket” item:

…to capture those random thoughts and bits of information that appear during the day.

The second is a GTD Projects List. Andre consults this list repeatedly throughout the day. In his words:

This saves me the trouble of having to leave the Chandler item I’m working with, find the GTD Projects List item, and then find my way back to the original item.

It’s an exciting time to be in this area of software development. Software companies are finally turning their attention to small organizations, businesses and households; groups that are less structured than traditional corporate environments.

Chandler falls into this new category of personal and collaboration tools for small, loosely structured workgroups. There are 2 significant ways in which Chandler departs from enterprise-scale collaboration tools:

One. Traditionally, many collaboration tools have been structured around “clients” and projects, which were presumed to have start and end dates and concrete deliverables, that once delivered meant the project was complete. Delivering for each client was assumed to be a relatively “straightforward, process-oriented” affair that could be mapped out in “workflows” that remained constant from one project to the next.

By contrast, Chandler assumes that new projects (or tasks) will continuously emerge from existing projects. Old projects change or become irrelevant before they’re even begun. As a result, “work” becomes a never-ending, ever-changing procession directed towards a higher-level goal. To be sure, deadlines and milestones exist along the way. But they are markers in a continuous progression as opposed to tidy endings to bounded projects.

In short, Chandler is designed for groups that are constantly re-inventing what it is they do and how they do it.

As a result, building and maintaining project and workflow structures for managing and organizing such a constantly changing morass of tasks, dates and unresolved issues just doesn’t seem worth it.

Instead, Chandler is intended for users who are actively looking for something that lets you stay “organized” at their own pace. They specifically don’t want to feel like they’re being pressured to set deadlines they’re not ready to set. They don’t want to be harassed about tasks you entered but no longer need to do. In other words, Chandler users want a “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” kind of tool.

Two. Traditionally, collaboration tools have focused on coordinating hand-off of information and shared resources (documents, media, etc) so that each member of the team has access to what they need in order to focus on their work.

By contrast, Chandler assumes that ownership of responsibilities is shared and passed from one member of the team to another with relative fluidity.

As a result, Chandler sharing isn’t modeled as a fileshare that gives everyone access to everyone else’s work. Instead, Chandler collaboration assumes that people need help working on the same thing together.

Sharing in Chandler is less about “watching” other people’s task lists and calendars and more about sharing a group collection and calendar where individual tasks are passed around or simply worked on in parallel by multiple people.

This doesn’t mean that “personal” collections can’t and shouldn’t be shared with others. It’s more a matter of “What is Chandler’s special sauce?” when it comes to collaboration.

This fluidy in collaboration also explains why Chandler is first and foremost a personal tool with built-in collaboration as opposed to straight-on groupware.

Our belief is that the line between “my work” and “your work” and “our work” is now sufficiently blurred such that tools that draw a hard line between personal and group task management simply erect unecessary hindrances that break common workflows.

Note: This is yet another way in which Chandler aspires to mimic email. People see email first and foremost as a personal tool. But fundamentally, email is about communicating and working with others. Nevertheless, the collaboration aspect of email is framed as an extension of the personal.)

Juggling my schedule and that of three young learners — plus all their extra-cirricular activities — isn’t easy. I need to be able to look at a calendar and tell who needs to do what (and who needs to be where) at a glance. To stay organized I use Chandler, an app so feature-rich that I don’t even use it to it’s fullest capability. I love the way it color codes whatever I throw at for easy sorting and retrieval. It also keeps a running to-do list for me, and it’s a snap to create new events, messages, and tasks.

The idea of a “running to-do” list is interesting. To me, it sounds like a task list that is unpredictable, always changing.

When building a task manager, it’s tempting to go down the path of developing features to map out projects with complex task landscapes: dependencies, time estimates, urgency and priority rankings, start times and end times, intermediate milestone dates, etc. There are certainly projects that require this kind of project / task manager (and as an open source project, Chandler can be extended to support such functionality).

However, the kinds of task lists Chandler serves best are precisely “running to-do lists” (or at least my understanding of what a “running to-do list” is.) Task lists that change so quickly, it’s not worthwhile to invest a lot of time inputting and maintaining a lot of meta-data about your tasks. Instead what’s important is a snappy way to get stuff out of your head and onto the task list, plus some basic affordances for tracking (Triage Status + Tickler Alarms) and organizing (Collections + Calendar) your tasks, so they don’t just pile up into one big, insurmountable mountain of to-dos.

Use Case: Setting up and Following-thru on a Meeting.

Edit, Evolve, Send and Re-Send the same item of information as your task to schedule a meeting turns into an invitation turns into a scheduled meeting on your calendar turns into an agenda list turns into meeting notes.

A simple meeting can often generate a dozen or more separate bits of information for everyone involved; bits of information that each person then needs to manage independently.

• You create a task item to schedule a meeting;
• Send out a separate email message to invite others to the meeting;
• Follow-up with a whole thread to work out the meeting agenda;
• And add the meeting to your calendar.

• As the meeting shifts around and the agenda changes (all information that arrives via more email messages), you update the event on your calendar.

• During the meeting, you write up notes and send them out in yet another email; which in turn
• Prompts responses as others amend your meeting notes in follow-up emails

When you go back to look for the definitive record of what was discussed and decided at that meeting, where do you start? There are so many bits to collate and reconcile into a “single source of truth”.

By contrast, in Chandler you have 1 item that you edit and amend over time with changes and new information.

Your task to schedule a meeting can be sent out as an invitation email and then put on your calendar once everyone has agreed to a suitable time. In parallel, you can pull together a meeting agenda on that same meeting event item. During the meeting, you can take meetings notes, again in the same meeting event item. All the while, you can send and resend the same task/event item to notify people who aren’t sharing through Chandler.

1. Collecting Agenda Items for a Meeting in a “Task List” View

2. Reviewing Meeting Notes from the Calendar

3. Sending an Update to the Event with Notes from the Meeting

More importantly, all of this use and re-use is plausible because you can access the same information item from different contexts (the calendar and the list view, multiple collections) and there is built-in support for “losing” and “finding” information. Otherwise, recycling and evolving notes and events would quickly turn into an onerous workflow you would not bother with.

In Chandler:

• Meetings on your calendar can be managed like tasks in a list view; and vice versa,
• Tasks can be tracked from the list view *and* put on the calendar to mark important deadlines and milestone dates;

• The LATER “Triage Status” allows you to “disappear” stuff you can’t deal with right now without losing it forever;
• Tickler alarms and event dates automatically re-focus your attention on things you need to follow-up on

This Recycling Workflow works for maintaining lists (shopping lists, lists of questions, thank you notes, etc) and working on drafts as well. Really, it applies to anything that evolves and changes over time.

Reducing sidebar organizational clutter: In Chandler, you get 9 different views of your data for every 1 Chandler collection you create.

• In the sidebar, you can generate 3 views of your data for every 1 collection you create. For example, rather than having a Home Calendar + Home Task List + All Home Stuff, you create 1 Home Collection and slice and dice it by navigating the Application Areas in the Toolbar.
• Within each collection, the 3 Triage Status sections give you 3 more ways to slice and dice each collection/application area.

Reducing duplication of information between your email, task list and calendar. In Chandler, you can:

• Manage calendar events as tasks in a list; and vice versa, you can
• Manage tasks by putting putting them on the calendar to mark important deadlines and milestones
• Address any item and send it out as an email

Reducing the # of information bits you generate by recycling your data with Triage Status, Tickler alarms and integrated Calendaring.

You can use and re-use your information items in Chandler by continuously editing and evolving a single item over time, even turn into a completely different kind of item.

Here’s a task to re-schedule a dentist appointment that turned into the new appointment on the calendar. This item originally started out as a confirmation email from my dentist, which I moved into Chandler and re-purposed as a reminder to re-schedule my appointment.

Sending, Editing and Re-Sending Email

With email, once you’ve sent a message, you can’t edit it anymore. Amendments can only be made by sending a new message. However, it’s not enough to just give people a way to keep editing a single item over time (which is what most task managers do).

Yet, one of the reasons email is so appealing is precisely because we can forget about everything that’s come before. Every new message is tabula rasa. There is a natural rhythmic cycle to work. We make a little bit of progress. We get stuck. We stop thinking about it for a while as the issue percolates in the nether regions of our brain or as we wait for someone else to get back to us. And then we pick it up again. In the meantime, email’s great at helping us “forget” about problems we can’t make progress on. The problem is, once you’ve lost something in email, it’s hard work to get it back.

Nevertheless, any effective alternative to email has to do a good job of disappearing and reappearing issues, in the right place, at the right time.

In Chandler, Triage Status allows you to forget about stuff (for a while) without losing it forever.

Instead of having a binary choice:

• Keep this in front of my face OR
• Lose it and forget about it forever…

You have 3 choices:

• Keep this in front of my face OR
• Keep this, but shove it off into LATER for now OR
• Lose it and forget about it because it’s DONE! or Obsolete.

You can move items in and out of your focus (NOW versus LATER) as many times as you need in order to finish the job. And if there are important deadline and milestone dates to remember, you can assign a Tickler Alarm or put the item on the Calendar and Chandler will re-focus the item for you on those dates.

Reducing duplication of information that is relevant to multiple contexts.

In Chandler, notes and events can appear in multiple collections. This means that events you and your spouse are attending together can appear as the same event on both of your calendars. Issues that need to be resolved for several projects can be tracked as the same note-item multiple project collections.

Tasks can show up in the context of a project collection and in a collection organized around a person, department or organization or a location (e.g. Things I need to discuss with Jan, HR stuff, or Home Office).

This allows you to organize your information in whatever way is most helpful to you without the up-keep of updating multiple versions of the same information.

Reduce the # of bits of information you exchange by Sharing.

This is somewhat self-explanatory. Instead of emailing back and forth, you could be editing the same lists, drafts, and meeting agendas with the people you work most closely with. When you need to alert people who aren’t sharing through Chandler, you can send (and re-send) the notes and events you’re working on via email.

These are some of the high-level design concepts. Stay tuned for a more specific scenario!

Expect to hear more stories from others soon!

My husband Alex and I travel back and forth between San Francisco and New York about once a month. Life gets complicated pretty quickly. For one, you never seem to have what you need in the right place.

We used to try and remind each other of things we needed to bring by emailing a packing list to each other. It was hard because inevitably, over the course of a month, new things would crop up. Tax forms, receipts to file expense reports, new super-duper floss from the dentist, gift for Mother’s Day, hiking boots! We’d end up with a lot of emails, each one with a different subset of what we actually needed to bring. Too often, we’d resort to texting and shouting things across the room as well. Inevitably, important things got left on the wrong coast.

Now, we have a shared Home collection in Chandler. We have lots of stuff in there. Everything from drafts of emails we need to send out to recurring bills and lists of questions for our accountant.

One of the more useful things we share is a packing list for our monthly migration. We just keep reusing the same list. We just keep amending it and cycling back and forth between the NOW and LATER sections. The list has now also expanded to include a checklist for the handful of shut-down and chuck-out tasks we need to do to make sure we don’t run up heating bills and start a mold farm in the fridge while we’re gone.

Having this “living packing list” has made the whole process a lot more efficient for us because much of the stuff stays the same from trip to trip: Clean out the fridge, move the car so that it’s behind the neighbors’ car (we have tandem parking), bring airplane headphones, netflix movies!, check into flight and print out boarding passes, etc.

However, we also always manage to have a list of things that change from trip to trip. For the past 3 months, we’ve been hauling tax return paraphernalia back and forth; each trip, swearing we’d be done with it once and for all. We’re still hauling. We’re each responsible for adding these “special-case” items to the list. No more, “But I told you 3x to remember that!” And best of all, no more texts and emails flying around that need to be tracked and collated.

Whenever I add something to the list, the packing list pops to the top of Alex’s NOW section so he sees my change. The same is true vice versa. So we’re also kept aware of the changes we’re each making.

The other problem with our email lists was that there was never a good place to “put them”. Sometimes, we just plain forgot to consult the list.

In Chandler, we’ve figured out ways to make the packing list show up automatically at the right time.

For example, once I know the dates for our flights, I’ll add an alarm to the packing list so that it pops into NOW for both of us the day of our flight. Or, I’ll put the packing list right on the calendar along with our flight information. Either way, we run into the list when we go looking for flight info.

The packing list isn’t the only list we’ve developed this process for. We have a running “present ideas” list. All those holidays, birthdays, wedding and baby showers! We keep track of preset ideas for friends and family and we keep track of what we’ve already given people…so we don’t inadvertently re-gift to the same person! The “gifts-given” list is also useful for re-using ideas for other people. I mean, how many different baby shower gifts can a person come up with anyway!

We have similar lists for thank you notes and stuff to buy. We keep 2 separate lists for “Household Projects”, one for each coast. They usually languish in the LATER section, but periodically, I’ll put an alarm on one of them so that it will pop into NOW the next time we’re on that coast.

This all sounds very organized of us. But we’ve never done anything like this before. Somehow, whenever we’ve tried to maintain lists like this with Excel or on his Palm Pilot, we’d give up after a while because it was too hard keep it up to date and inevitably, we’d end up with mis-matched duped information in email or on his Outlook calendar.

I’m using Chandler for work as well, but for a long while, the Home scenario was the only one I had working. Figuring out clever ways to use it for personal stuff helped me wrap my head around how I could use it for work. Not everything translates, but a lot of it is remarkably similar, but I’ll leave that for a separate post.

We’ve stripped out quite a bit of chrome. In many ways, the Preview release was an experiment. We threw out ideas out in order to see what would stick. 0.7.5 is what stuck.

But simplicity is more complex than that.

The changes we’ve made have simplified the interface. But there is simplicity at the workflow and information modeling levels of application to consider as well, and that simplicity isn’t new.

With a new, pared down UI, we’re hoping more users will discover the underlying simplicity at the heart of the application.

What do I mean by underlying simplicity?

There are tools that are simple at the conceptual and user interface level, but complex when it comes to workflow and information management.

Not to pick on email, but email is one of them. Email concepts are simple: Send and Receive messages. Reply-to and Forward messages. However what ensues from this simplicity is a propensity to divide and multiply; which results in the overflowing, hard to parse, hard to manage Inboxes we love to hate. Email begets more email and we’re responding with all kinds of ways to keep the onslaught under control: Auto-filtering strategies, tagging and categorization schemes and Inbox kung-fu processing techniques.

By contrast, Chandler aims to tame your inbox by reducing the volume of information bits you generate (individually and as a group).

Imagine if…

• Instead of starting up new emails every time you have a new thought on an old problem; you could keep editing emails after they’ve been sent/received.
• Instead of copying and pasting information from email onto your calendar; you could take emails and put them directly on the calendar to mark event dates, deadlines and important milestones.
• Instead of resending information to yourself as reminders; you could set alarms on the emails you already have so that they arrive again in your Inbox at the time of your choosing.
• Instead of duplicating information in order to get it into all the right places; you could file messages into multiple folders so that the same email showed up in all the contexts you need it to: Invoices, status, by project; your stuff, your spouse’s stuff, errands list, etc.
• Instead of having a forest of flagged items crowding out new messages in your Inbox; you could cordon off the things you’re working on NOW from stuff that can wait until LATER.

To be clear, Chandler still isn’t meant to replace your email application. Instead, email to us, has served as an invaluable design-model for the best and the worst in information management and collaboration. Studying it carefully is how we think we can make Chandler a compelling alternative to email. See more detailed analysis.

So, instead of scattering your thoughts across dozens of email messages, text files, calendars and task lists, try putting them into Chandler and try out some of the scenarios described above.

(Stay tuned for a more detailed analysis and an illustrative scenario of how Chandler can simplify the information in your life.)

Then of course, I immediately ran into this one.

So, is it true? Will a new generation of collaboration tools help us wean ourselves off email? (The same way IM and social networking have already weaned us off email for social interactions.)

We hope so.

Chandler is most useful when used as an alternative for all the important stuff you used to do with email.

This should be true if you’re just using Chandler for yourself. This is doubly true if you’re sharing with others because at its best, Chandler opens up an alternative, more ergonomic channel for collaboration that results in fewer bits of information to keep track of and allows the group to leverage individual efforts to manage and organize information.

However, any collaboration medium that attempts to supplant email needs to retain what’s great about email while avoiding the pitfalls that have us all reeling from overflowing inboxes.

Here are some lists of email characteristics we want to emulate and avoid in Chandler.

What we want to keep: Email doesn’t get in the way of your ideas!

1. Every new message is a blank slate. Unlike other collaboration mediums (CMSes, Wikis, Project Managers, Shared Documents) composing new email doesn’t require you to first figure out how this “new thing” fits in with everything that’s come before.
2. Email lets you tackle issues in bite-sized pieces.
   

   Bite-sized means it’s easier to get started on tackling hard problems.

   Bite-sized also means you can manage email like a task list (as many people do). This in turn helps you multi-task. You can start, develop, fork and resolve dozens of threads at the same time. You keep track of it all by flagging/filing individual messages. With email, big, intractable problems are conveniently broken down into bite-sized next actions.

3. Email lets you tackle issues from multiple angles. You can formulate and reformulate what you’re thinking in a dozen different ways, addressed to a dozen different groups of people. Again, unlike other collaboration mediums, there’s no pre-existing structure to get in the way of what you need to do. Each new message/thread exists as it’s own, independent topic of discussion.
4. Email is free-form. Email messages are all about the wide-open field of unstructured data we call the message body. It allows you to focus on what you need to communicate! Whom you need to communicate with, is the only unavoidable decision you need to make. However, with the advent of aliases (everyone@wholeoffice), even that decision is avoidable.

1. Email is universal. Not everyone is on your Exchange server. Not everyone has access to your company’s intranet. But everyone (for all intensive purposes) is on email these days. Email is the one communication medium where you’re guaranteed to get through (except when overzealous SPAM filters get in the way). Whether someone will actually absorb your communication is a separate issue.
2. Email is asynchronous. You can continue to make progress on other work as you wait for responses. This means you can work independently of your colleagues without losing touch.
3. Email keeps you up-to-date on what’s new. Every “new” piece of information is pushed to you as a new message. You never have to remember to “check-in” to find out what’s going on. You also never have to go hunting through an edited document wondering, What’s changed? Did something change?
4. Email encourages discussion. Email is linear. Each person gets their say. (However, while talking on top of one another is no longer a problem, no tool can prevent people from talking past each other.)

What we want to avoid and improve on: Email begets more email!
The very qualities that make email the defining tool of the information workplace are also its Achilles heel. Email is too easy to send. Each email in turn spawns more email to the point where you can no longer see the forest for the trees and you need to create more bits of information to keep track of the bits you’re losing in email.

1. There’s no way to “silently” make information available on an “as-needed” basis. To get information out, you have to send the email, thereby actively pinging every recipient with a message, regardless of whether you need their active attention. Ergo, we all get a lot of FYI mail, which in turn, dilutes the pool of mail that actually requires a response.
2. You can’t edit email. Once you’ve sent it, it’s done. If you forgot something, if someone else wants to add something to your list, if there’s been a change in plans, you’ll have to send a separate email. Ergo, we all get a lot of “update” emails.
3. When a mail goes out to 1 or 200 people, every recipient has to do the work of processing that email. Oftentimes, we process it in exactly the same way: Received a notice to hand in your benefit forms? Add it to the calendar. Put it in your “HR” folder. Yet, there’s no good way to distribute that work across the group. Ergo, we all spend a lot of time managing email.
4. There’s no way to add structure to email. The unstructured, blank slate that email offers when you’re initially composing the message is great for unblocking the free-flow of information. However, once you do have enough of a clue to add a bit more structure, you can’t. Ergo, email results in the creation of even more bits of information to manage as each email creates new calendar events and task items.
5. There’s no source of truth. Decisions are amended and reversed over multiple, forking threads. People are added and removed from conversations. Uncovering “the truth” in email turns out to be subjective and hard-won.

There are a dozen different ways in which Chandler strives to meet the ideal described above. We’ve already begun to see success stories of users moving their work from email into Chandler and we’re using them to help us become a better alternative to email!

Then, I came across Chris Brogan’s How I tamed my inbox. I’ve seen write-ups like this before, but this post really resonates with how Chandler is meant to be useful as a companion to email. Namely: Get important stuff out of email into a trusted system that has better affordances for managing the things you need to do. Chris Brogan’s trusted system consists of a lightweight filing system, a to-do list/project manager (Things) and a calendar (Google Calendar).

With Chandler, you get the to-do-list and calendar in one, integrated package

To quote Chris:

If any of my projects are time specific, I put that information into Google Calendar. I then set up the reminders along the way. Further, if the project is large or lengthy, I set up little milestone time frames such that I will remember to work periodically on projects all the way up to their due date.

Takeaways: Nothing gets done in a single sitting. The ability to see to-dos on a calendar is critical.

I have notes and details on a new conference I’m launching for marketers for September in the Boston area.

Takeaway: Keeping track of “notes about what I need to do” is just as important as keeping track of what I need to do.

However, I haven’t seen much discussion of sharing as a way to deal with “email overload”. Instead, too-much-email is most often portrayed as a personal information management problem.

Yet, email is first and foremost a communication tool, a way for groups to collaborate. If there’s a problem with email, it’s a group information management problem.

Ergo, sharing is very relevant to “email overload”. In addition to helping people deal with “too much email”, we can and should also be looking for ways to:

1. Reduce the amount of email we send and receive by restructuring the way information is disseminated and developed over time; and
2. Reduce the amount of time we spend managing email by sharing and distributing the work of putting information into the right contexts. (Only 1 person should ever have to do the work of putting things onto the right task lists and calendars!)

To be clear, I’m not saying that the solution is as simple as: Don’t email, just share! The point I’d like to make is more precise: Sharing is an important part of how we fix email, provided we don’t create yet another collaboration medium that simply generates more email!

Chandler attempts to walk this line and while there is always more work to do, we’ve already seen success in reducing email for our users. I will follow up with a more detailed blog post on how you can “Send less email” and “Spend less time managing email” with Chandler.