The Chandler Project Blog

I’ve been working on a Chandler Server feature that allows users to setup and receive a daily/weekly agenda via email that would include upcoming items for the day/week and also a list of items with a triage status of NOW. While this work isn’t done, I’ve discovered a way to get a daily agenda for a collection shared on Chandler Hub using Google Calendar. So in the mean time if you want an easy way to get a daily agenda via email (or SMS) you can do the following:

1. Log in to Chandler Hub and open collection details for collection you want to receive notifications for (click on down arrow next to collection name in collection list):

   

2. If it hasn’t been done already, click [Invite] to generate sharing links.
3. Right-click or Cmd-Click (Mac) on either one of the [Invite] link to Copy Link. (Note Collections you subscribed to will only display 1 “Invite” link, the link you used to subscribe.)
4. Log in to your Google Calendar account
5. In your calendar list, click on [Add] pulldown and select Add by URL

   

6. Paste the URL obtained in step 2 into Public Calendar Address field, changing “pim” to “webcal”. The URL should look something like: https://hub.chandlerproject.org/pim/collection/215715b0-5a0b-11dd-92a1-e12efc62301d?ticket=26htadc0
7. Click [Add]
8. In the calendar list, click on the down arrow and select Notifications

   

9. Setup daily agenda email or SMS

You are done! Google Calendar will automatically refresh the URL every few hours and will send a daily agenda to you at 5am every morning.

Of course there are some limitations. The email will go to your gmail account, the agenda only includes events, there is a possibility of data being out of date, there is no triage status information, and no way to link back to the original items on Chandler Hub. Of course, this is why we are currently developing these features for the server!

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.

You start out with a simple email. Perhaps notes from a meeting…

Hi!

Here are some of the issues we noted during out meeting.

1. …
2. …
3. …
4. …

It occurred to me that I actually have a number of questions about #2. Off the top of my head, some of them are:

• …
• …
• …

I’m sure I’ll think of more.

We also talked about looking into these options as possible ways to resolve ….

• …
• …
• …
• …

Unfortunately, I don’t know the status of …, does anybody else know? Should we look into this more?

Here are some other next actions that came out of the meeting:

• …
• …
• …
• …

Am I missing anything?

This 1 email might generate 15 separate threads of conversations.

People respond with:

- More open issues
- Questions about the open issues
- Questions about #2
- Answers to your question re: the status of …
- More next actions
- Status updates on next actions they’ve already started
- Stuff you forgot

You make progress as a group. But all of your work is buried in 1, 2, 3, 10 threads of emails.

Each message opens up more open issues to track, more questions to answer, more next actions to do.

You end up with dozens to hundreds of flagged email you need to react to in some way. But before you have a chance to reflect on what’s already been said, new information comes in.

By contrast, how might this work in Chandler?

You take the first message and you immediately break it down into separate items:

- List of open issues
- Spin out issue #2 because you already know you want to start up a list of questions about it that others can contribute to and perhaps answer.
- Possible options to resolve … becomes it’s own list
- Split out option … as it’s own item because like issue #2, you already have more information about aaa that you want to track.
- Each next action becomes its own item

Now, you and your group have a loosely structured space to fill in as you make progress on closing open issues, answering questions and completing next actions.

People can “respond” by:

- Adding more open issues to the open issues list.
- Spinning off issues as independent items as soon as they start working on resolving them
- Adding more questions to the questions about #2 item.
- Creating more next actions as they emerge.
- Update their status on next actions on the next action item itself.

In this way, Chandler allows you to “break apart” complex discussions into their component issues, questions, next actions and running lists so that as you progress (individually and as a group), you have a modicum of “organization” where you can create issue-centric places to collect and store ideas, thoughts, questions, status updates, etc. As a result, “discussion” about open issues happen on items dedicated defined around the issue, task, idea you’re grappling with, not mixed up in long email threads that cover a potpourri of topics relevant to the project.

That is the key difference between Chandler and Email.

Email collaboration unfolds around discussions, which can meander and bloom into unmanageable, tangled threads from which it becomes impossible to extract a “source of truth” about what’s actually going on.

In Chandler, collecting a list of open issues or questions becomes a shared task in a shared workspace where everyone can see and edit the same list.

Ever since Jeffrey put up the Chandler Quick Entry gadget on iGoogle, people have been asking for the same functionality on their desktop. Marcelo de Moraes Serpa recently figured out a way to do this for Linux. See his detailed instructions below!

I downloaded the deb package for the latest version of Screenlets.

Once you have installed Screenlets,

1. Press alt+f2 and enter screenlets-manager to open the Screenlets Manager.
2. Click [Install] to open the Install dialog.
3. Choose [Convert Web Widget] from the list.
4. Click [Ok].

The Convert Widget dialog will pop up.

1. Leave the pulldown on Google Gadgets.
2. [Click Go to web page].

You will be taken to the iGoogle Gadget Directory.

1. Find the Chandler Quick Entry Widget.
2. Click View Source in the bottom, right-hand sidebar.

Copy the code.

1. Go back to the Convert Widget dialog and paste this code into the edit box below the Step 2 … label:
2. Give the widget a name (e.g: Chandler Quick Entry).
3. Click [Ok].

From the Screenlets widgets bar, double-click to launch the newly added Chandler Quick Entry widget. (You can also search to find it. (Screenshot taken from the Screenlets website.)

You can configure it to auto-launch on startup and create a desktop shortcut for it as well! Great!

Peter Allen blogged recently about his experiences using Chandler:

I started using the Chandler Project a while back and I really liked it. It gives you tickler alarms for things you need to do plus a space for notes. So instead of a calendar where once the date is past, the event is gone, it’s a recurring reminder. It’s like a Jack Russel Terrrier, always jumping around and wanting attention. And every little thing can get recorded in its entries so when the reminder goes off, the appropriate info is at your fingertips.

Depending on who you talk to, a piece of software that reminds you of a Jack Russell Terrier could either be very good, or very bad That aside, Peter’s post is a pretty succinct articulation of what’s unique about Reminders and Calendar Dates in Chandler. Alerts that pop up once work well for reminding you to do “2-minute” tasks like “Take your pills” or “Go to meeting”.

But reminders to start working on persistent, long-term projects like “Work on proposal for…” or “Come up with questions for…” fail miserably if they simply appear and disappear. Instead, setting “reminder dates” needs to work hand-in-hand with a way to manage your focus over long stretches of time. Chandler accomplishes this by not only providing “short-term” alerts in the form of pop-up dialogs, but by also using reminder and event dates to automatically re-focus notes and events into your list of “NOW” items. By contrast, a solution that worked more like a Jack Russell Terrier might be one that keeps popping up reminder dialogs every 5-10 minutes until you finish the task, but perhaps I betray my personal feelings about Jack Russells.

The following screenshot was taken from the Chandler Product Tour:

Unfortunately, Peter ran into performance issues:

Alas, the software is still too slow for me.

But, he did add the caveat:

If you have a fast machine, it’s worth checking out.

We recognize that poor performance is a deal-breaker for many people who have tried to use Chandler and we’re addressing it as part of a major re-architecture project. Still, it’s nice to see that some of these “harder to quantify” features of Chandler are proving to be of use!

Chris Janssen, of Edinburgh
University, wrote into the Users-List about why he chose Chandler to collaborate with his team. They seem to be really pushing the boundaries of Chandler’s “integrated approach” to task and calendar management, tracking to-dos both as a list in the Triage Table View and with assigned time slots on the calendar:

“I use Chandler daily/ heavily to coordinate projects and tasks within my team. The reasons why I have taken up Chandler:

• project management needed more fine grained task management than gantt charts provide; i.e. projects needed to be broken down into small tasks.
• it is important that tasks are assigned to time slots in the calendar; i.e. tasks need specific time slots in which they are worked on – this prevents overloading and helps with time management issues when people really have too much to do.
• tasks need to be persistent until marked as done. Just using a calendar slot for task/ time management is no good, since the task will automatically expire once the time/ date has passed, even if it is not completed. The current version (0.7.5.1. and 0.7.6) solves this beautifully (with the “Dashboard”).

…I have to say that Chandler (in its present incarnation) has proven an excellent solution.”

Although Chandler does not formally support Contacts, we’ve heard of a number of users managing contact information in Chandler nonetheless, albeit in unconventional ways that stretch the boundaries of what traditional Address Books are used.

The Common Datatrust Foundation, previously profiled here, also uses Chandler to manage Contacts, in a “lightweight CRM” (Customer Relationship Management) kind of way. However, instead of tracking “Customers” CDTF is keeping track of the broad range of people they are engaging with from researchers in academia to technical advisers and potential partners and board members.

CDTF maintains a Contacts collection. Each person is a note. Most of the contacts are people I have worked with or have been introduced to through colleagues and friends. So I have endeavored to write up a short description of each person, how I know them, how much we’ve discussed CDTF and why and how they might be interested in what CDTF is up to.

As Grace and I continue to develop these relationships, we revise and update the Notes for each contact. Meetings on the other hand are tracked separately as Events in other Collections, depending on which area. It would be easier for us if we could somehow link the Contact Items to related Meetings. For now, we rely on Search to pull together a complete profile for each person.

We manage the CDTF Contacts collection like a task list. It’s almost always sorted by Triage Status. We have a small set of NOW – Contacts, people we are actively talking to (7 currently). An ambitiously long set of LATER Contacts (46), people we really should get in touch with or need to have follow-up conversations with. As we make progress and establish lasting relationships with people, I imagine some of our Contacts will go into the DONE category. For now, every person represents more work for us!

(Emphasis and screenshots were added.)

I’m a Gemini. I can’t help it, I was born that way, so I have the attention span of a goldfish and two thousand things that interest me and I’d like to follow up on.

I run a one-man band PC support company, my wife handles day-to-day calls and schedules appointments whilst I’m visiting customers. She also looks after our family bed & breakfast. In addition, we like to get out whenever we can to live music but, living in the sticks, we need to factor in a two-hour each way journey. Chandler helps me to make sense of it all and instill some kind of order from the chaos.

The hardest thing with organising ’stuff’ is picking out the immediately important things, whilst keeping track of the things that don’t need to be done yet without wasting too much time on them. It’s here that Chandler just sort of works the way that I do.

There’s the trivial but still necessary stuff:

• buy worm tablet for cat, so that I can treat on the right day
• monthly payment for ’something’ is due: make sure there’s enough money in the right account
• family birthdays, remember to buy/send card and gift
• car insurance due, start getting quotes

All of these are set up as repeating no time events, with an alarm set a suitable time in advance. When the alarm triggers, the event pops into Chandler’s Now section to attract my attention. Before that, it’s just sitting there, out of the way. I can find it if I need it, but it doesn’t intrude.

The following screenshot was taken from the Chandler Product Tour:

There’s the important stuff:

I have irregular appointments with various clients, all of which are entered in Chandler in a standard format (name, details, etc). By flipping from Calendar view to Triage view and sorting by Title, I can quickly bring together all appointments with a particular customer, to review progress. Filtering by name then sorting by date gives me a similar overview, in date order.

Unfiltered sorting in date order gives me an overview of the coming few weeks, more effectively than flipping through a week at a time, like a month view but easier to assimilate. Of course, if I want a month view, it’s there too.

And on top of all of this, I can choose which collections (work, music, home, b&b, etc) appear in which combinations in which view.

There’s sharing:

If I make an appointment in the field or my wife makes one at home, one click and the other is aware of it, minimising the chance of double bookings.

My laptop, my Ultra Mobile PC, my office machine and my wife’s machine are all in sync, all the time.

There’s the way it just works:

With a little bit of automatic filtering in Thunderbird, relevant messages just drop into Chandler. A couple of clicks and they’re tasks.

I have a task to ring a customer re an appointment. Looking at it in Triage view, I can drag it straight to the calendar where it just becomes an appointment. Add a time, untick the Star/Task button and the task disappears, leaving just the appointment. But that’s in a couple of weeks, so it just drops into ‘Later’ until I need to notice it.

And there’s what I think of as a bit of a USP of Chandler – that ‘I’ve achieved all of this’ feeling. At the end of the day, click ‘Done’ on all the stuff that’s finished with. Pat myself on the back for what I’ve achieved, then click Clean Up and watch them disappear! They’re still there if I need them, but out of the way, out of mind.

I’ve used a load of different programs on PC and PDA, but Chandler is the closest I’ve found to how I seem to see the world. It’s not yet perfect, but it’s getting better by the week.

I’m using it every day. I can’t think of a better endorsement.

Alex Selkirk has been using Chandler for the past year. For 5 months or so, he’s been using it to collaborate with a colleague. Here is his account of one of the ways they use Chandler to work together.

I started a not-for-profit last year, The Common Datatrust Foundation. Our organization is new and small. I work with one other person, Grace, two days a week.

Our processes are still rather fluid. However, we are far along enough that 6-7 areas of activity have emerged:

• General (meaning, stuff that defies categorization!)
• Community
• Board
• Blog
• Governance
• Contacts
• Funding

Each of these corresponds to a collection in Chandler. We share all 7 collections.

One of the better worked out routines we’ve established is around collecting, and developing ideas for our blog. We have 2 blog collections. 1 for brainstorming. It has close to 200 ideas. We don’t hold back. Anything and everything that might be blog-worthy gets thrown in there. If it’s an article, I usually paste the link to the article plus the content of the article right into the item. It’s not always apparent what the “point” of the blog post might be so I usually spend a couple of minutes and try to articulate what it was I found interesting about the article.

Developing an idea in “Reading List”:

Ideas that are either time-sensitive or have somehow gelled into a clear point are promoted to a second, more closely guarded “Blog Queue” collection. “Blog Queue” currently has 34 items, 29 of which are DONE with 2 in NOW and 2 in LATER.

Finalizing our blog categories in “Blog Queue”:

Basically, these are the posts we’re actually going to publish. We work through many, many drafts for these posts in Chandler. Grace will usually draft a first pass together based on whatever exchange we’d already had when the post was still just an idea in the “Reading List” collection. As we work through iterations, we leave comments for each other either in-line or at the top, above the draft itself. Chandler doesn’t yet “officially” support comments on items so we have made up our own nomenclature to keep track of what said what. This works well enough for 2-3 people but I can see it getting out of hand if more people were to pitch in. (Although, keeping commentary straight would be the least of our problems if 5 people were trying to write 1 blog post together!) For particularly difficult posts, we might go through 5-6 drafts before we get it “right enough”, at which point, we move the post into Wordpress for formatting and final review. However, we’ll continue to leave comments about the post in Chandler.

If we didn’t have Chandler, I’m not sure how we would do this. Email isn’t great for managing lists of things together. As for working through drafts together, whenever we’ve moved our discussions over to email and Word docs, we run into problems trying to keeping track of different versions. Chandler on the other hand, forces us to stay up-to-date and summarize where we’re at with any given post. When a blog post item starts to get too messy, one of us will go in and clean it up, delete what’s no longer important, summarize key points and pull together a coherent latest draft. If the text editing capabilities were a bit more robust (just the ability to tab would be huge), we wouldn’t feel the need to move over to email at all.

This is just one of the ways Grace and I work together using Chandler. As it’s turns out, we’ve been doing most of our work in Chandler and only use email to communicate news and information that doesn’t require follow up. Who would’ve thought!

Full Disclosure: Chandler Product Designer, Mimi Yin is on the board of The Common Datatrust Foundation and is also married to Alex Selkirk.

Although Chandler does not formally support Contacts, we have heard of a number of users managing contact information in Chandler nonetheless, albeit in unconventional ways that stretch the boundaries of what traditional Address Books are used.

Benjamin Wilreker teaches cultural anthropology and archaeology in the Department of Human Behavior at the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas. He recently wrote into the Users List describing how he manages contacts in Chandler (examples in [ ], mine).

Note: We’re still not recommending Chandler as a replacement for your Address Book. It currently does not have the capability to keep track of email addresses, phone numbers and addresses for hundreds of people. However, it is interesting to see people making the most of the basic Chandler “Note” to integrate managing information about people with their todos and appointments.

I have been using Chandler about 9 months now. I have a collection named “Contacts.” Each contact is a Chandler note titled after the name of the contact using a Last Name, First Name nomenclature. The contact list in the collection is sorted by title, thus creating an alpha-by-last-name list of contacts for easy browsing.

The details of the contact info (i.e. email address, phone number, birthdate) appear in the text field for each contact. Most of these contacts are cross-listed in other appropriate collections (i.e. research contacts are cross-listed with the appropriate research project collection.) Some personal contacts and friends only appear in “Contacts.”

Strengths of this approach:

• It is simple and context dependent. I always have the contacts I need for a particular project sitting in front of me. In practice I seldom use my global contacts list – I use the collection-associated contacts frequently.
• Because there are no defined fields, each record can be modified to suit the nature of the contact. As I skim the contacts I’m working with right now, I see one contact that “Reads Middle Egyptian” and another one that “Likes to get cards/gifts for groundhog day (feb 2)”
• If necessary, the contact can be used as a task, although in practice I tend to create new tasks instead.

Weaknesses of this approach:

• Chandler has no way to designate an item as a notice [as in "for reference" item] and not an action item [as in "to-do"]. I set my contacts as “later” and set the collection so that the items do not appear in my dashboard. In major projects with dozens of collaborators, this becomes an issue, because the contacts marked as “later” are indistinguishable from waiting tasks (also noted as “later”), and from non-contact, non-action items (i.e. a works cited list) that also appear as “later.”
• Because I am using the open text field, there is no prompting for particular types of information (i.e.”Children’s names”) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten to collect an important piece of information because there was no blank field to be filled in. Eventually I created a blank contact with a list of frequently used fields that I could copy and paste into new contacts when I created them.
• Chandler is not a main line email client. Because the notes field does not allow hypertext markup, I can’t create a mailto: command that would open my default email client, in this case Thunderbird, directly from my “contact.”
• Since I am using the notes field, obviously the data can only be entered by hand, and cannot be exported or imported to/from other applications using a commonly recognized format.