Chris Kelly recently blogged about his use of Chandler. He uses it for personal to-dos and reference notes and collaborates with a team of 5 people on software development for Gallery.

Here are some choice quotes:

On personal use:

On August 8, Chandler 1.0 was announced and I decided to give it a shot. First I just used it for my personal tasks related to Gallery, which I stored in Chandler Hub, but in less than a week I realized how powerful of a tool Chandler really was…I stopped using my paid Remember The Milk account and Google Calendar, and over the next few days moved everything into Chandler.

On collaborating with others:

…it’s taken a little bit of effort to get everyone using it the same way but the results have been an even bigger deal here…Chandler is a very low overhead way for developers to keep track of what they are doing in such a way that anyone can easily get the big picture in one place. Chandler has gotten rid of the need for weekly status reports to our mailing list…Everyone knows who is responsible for things and I can finally spend a lot less time harassing people…This frees up a lot of time so that developers can get back to developing and our meetings are back to lively discussion and decision making instead of boring project overhead.

One common question about Chandler is: Are Chandler Items (Notes, Events, Messages, All of the Above) supposed to represent individual task items or projects? If they are individual tasks? How do you make a project? If they are projects, how do you split off individual tasks?

The real answer is: Neither…and Both. Chandler items are by design, ambiguous about whether they represent tasks or projects, because tasks and projects are in reality, ambiguous. Oftentimes what starts out as a neat line-item task can quickly spiral into a half-dozen issues to resolve, questions to answer, not to mention to-dos to do. Sometimes, Chandler notes are most useful simply as a way of keeping track of lists of individual tasks.

Jos Yule recently wrote into the Chandler-Users list describing how he uses Chandler items to keep track of lists: Bugs, Current Work and a Log.

I’ve been using Chandler successfully now since the 7.x release, and
have been quite happy.

I’m using it for both personal and business “stuff”, and i’m trying to
get a feel for how other might be using for Software Development.

Redmine is a web-based software development
tool, with issue tracking, milestones, message boards, wiki’s and
integrated version control tools. It really quite rocks. However, a lot
of the time i feel like it is over-kill for most of my projects. I like
the flexibility that Chandler gives me.

On one of my projects, I’m using the Hub to give access to some of the
projects notes to other stakeholders, coders, artist, audio guys, etc.
… What i’m doing is, in Chandler, i’ve got a collection, Project X,
which is where i keep all my notes related to that project. I then have
a “Project X Public” collection which is published to the Hub, where I
have dragged notes which are to be shared with other team members from
the private “Project X” collection. I’ve got a BUGS note, and a CURRENT
WORK note. This seems to be working so far, but i’m wondering what other
software devs do (if anything)? I haven’t had to get too granular so
far, ie. just a general BUGS note, but I figure that if I need to I can
create a new note for each important bug, and have that in the public
collection too… I’ve also got a LOG note where I record what I’ve been
working on…

Anyway, that’s what i’m doing… How about you?

Note The screenshots below do not include real data.

The Dashboard collection in Chandler has some interesting properties (not all of which, intentional that have proven fertile ground for experimentation by some of our more adventurous users.

Going into Preview, we had a number of theories about what user needs the Dashboard would fulfill. Some of our assumptions have played out, others haven’t. Here is a recap:

1. We thought it was important for users to get a cross-collection view of all their data where the could process items regardless of what collections (groupings, contexts, categories) they had been assigned to. It’s also a handy way to see what’s new across all of your collections without having to click on individual collections one-by-one.

2. On the other hand, given the number of “other people’s collections” an user might subscribe to, we wanted to make sure that people had a way of quarantining FYI subscriptions from the personal collections in their Dashboard. As a result, we implemented a “Keep out of Dashboard” feature that allowed you to quarantine items on a per-collection basis so that they weren’t automatically picked up by the Dashboard.

There are still some behavioral idiosyncracies to be worked out, but it’s been interesting to see how users have made creative use of these 2 relatively simple ways to define the Dashboard view.

1. Some people use the Dashboard get a view across of “their personal stuff” versus “other people’s stuff”. (I use it this way, although I don’t spend very much time in the Dashboard collection.)

2. Some use the Dashboard purely as a place to collect new notes, an “intake” area so-to-speak. Once the note has been “processed” and added to the appropriate collections, it is removed from the Dashboard. In order to make this work, all of your collections must be initially kept out of the Dashboard. (This is analogous to the GTD Collection phase.)

3. Some use the Dashboard as a way of hand-picking a sub-set of NOW items to focus on “Today”. (I imagine these would be users who find themselves regularly ending up with pretty large NOW sections in each collection.) Again, in order to make this work, all of your collections must be initially kept out of the Dashboard.

How are you using the Dashboard?

One of the most common questions we get about Chandler is: Can I sync my Chandler data onto my mobile device?

The answer is Yes! While there aren’t full-featured Chandler mobile apps for all the various mobile platforms, you can sync Chandler data onto any device that can sync with or subscribe to calendars via .iCalendar or CalDAV.

Specifically, that means you can:

1. Publish your collections to Chandler Hub;
2. Subscribe to them with Apple iCal or Google Calendar;
3. Use either Apple iSync or Google Mobile to get your Chandler data onto your mobile device.

Currently Apple doesn’t sync To-do’s onto iPods or the iPhone, so you won’t see Chandler Notes on Apple’s devices. However, Apple iSync will sync To-dos onto Palm devices.

Google Calendar on the other hand, currently does not support tasks at all, so you can only sync events thru Google Calendar.

Apple iCal 3.x (Leopard) supports view-and-edit sharing via CalDAV, meaning you can make changes from your mobile device and they will sync back to Chandler. However, with Apple iCal 2.x (Tiger) and Google, you can only view your Chandler data.

There is a test build that supports 2-way view-and-edit sharing via CalDAV with Google. However, it has not yet been incorporated into the official release of Chandler desktop.

Liz Cademy wrote in with a success story linking Chandler to her iPod via iCal and iSync. I too, have been happily syncing 5 of my Chandler collections (events and notes!) to my new pink Palm Centro via iCal and iSync for a couple of weeks now. I’m thinking of finally upgrading from Tiger to Leopard so I can edit as well as view from my phone.

Has anyone else tried syncing to mobile devices in this way?

Windows and Linux users: A couple of users have written in to the Users-List about handy tools they’ve found to make it possible to minimize Chandler to the system tray.

• TrayIt for Windows: http://www.teamcti.com/trayit
• AllTray for Linux: http://alltray.sourceforge.net

For a couple of months now, Chandler Hub has supported the ability to sync all of your Chandler data (not just events) onto other iCalendar or CalDAV to applications and tasks.

Chandler notes (starred or plain) should now show up in other iCalendar or CalDAV calendar applications (e.g. Apple iCal, and Lightning) as Tasks (VTODOS).

Here are instructions on how to subscribe to Chandler collections from other calendar applications. (Unfortunately, some Chandler-specific will be lost. e.g. NOW and LATER triage status will both be interpreted as “Not-Done”. Anytime events will look the same as All-day events.)

I also demo this in the second half of the new 3-Minute Feature Tour. Also available (lo-res) on YouTube.

Has anyone made use of this feature yet?

Recently, a new user wrote in to the Users List asking if Chandler would be useful for maintaining Family calendars.

David Read responded that he was using Chandler in exactly that way:

Liz,

My family uses Chandler just the way you are describing. Each individual has a calendar and Chandler makes it easy to view each as part of a unified schedule.

The big win for me is that whether I’m home, at work or out of town, I have a way to check upcoming events to be sure I don’t schedule something in conflict (like missing a Parent-Teacher conference).

My mother and in-laws are also local and they love having a way to see upcoming events like the grandchildren’s concerts and dance recitals.

Prior to Chandler (we’ve been using it for over a year now) we maintained a paper-based calendar (really the school calendar with our notes). I can’t imagine going back to that.

Regards,

-Dave

Note: Not Real Data

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.