The Chandler Project Blog

Rick Rawson wrote into the Users List a few months back the good and the bad in Chandler. (Bold and large type, mine.)

“As course director for a very large (16 credits) course in a professional program, I have a need to be able to coordinate and collaborate with a number of colleagues to prepare for and implement this course, which is logistically complicated. I have investigated a number of software solutions to no avail. These include:

• Airset
• Remember The Milk
• Spicebird
• ZOHO (project)
• Google calendar
• Thinking Rock
• Code Project
• Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning
• Abstract Spoon’s ToDo List
• Open source project managers

“I have tried each one, but none worked because, depending on the application, the web interface was too limiting, integration of various components was insufficient, required components were missing (task list with no calendar), collaboration was not available, or the software had too long of a learning curve. Project managers are simply the wrong solution.

“I stumbled across Chandler and was instantly enthusiastic. Being a bit of a geek, I went with the flow when I discovered that cut/copy/paste and print did not work. Go figure! OK, I’ll work with it.

“The desktop app is clean, slick, easy to use, easy to learn. Very short learning curve. Screen real-estate is used effectively. No other application puts collection lists, the calendar, and a detail view all on the same screen. I can see what I need to see, all in one place. In my opinion, having to click a button to access information is a virtual brick wall. Chandler avoids this for the most part.”

The following screenshot was taken from the Chandler Product Tour:

“Multiple, overlaying calendars is extremely useful. That the underlying calendar color fades is more-than-a-cool feature not found in the likes of Google calendar. It was a bonus to discover that I could copy an event to a second calendar and retain the freedom to delete one of those copies without deleting both. Putting “location” in the event on the calendar would be nice, but not essential.

“The completely seamless connection between messages, tasks, and events is unique in my experience. It frees me from having to think ahead. I can brainstorm lists of tasks, then go back and stick them on a calendar, moving them around as needed. I am not aware of another application that does this. Ability to create “projects” with tasks and subtasks would be nice but its absence is not a showstopper. Inability to do a secondary sort on the triage table reduces my productivity significantly, but it’s not enough to make me quit using Chandler…yet.

The existence of Chandler Hub and the provision for easy sharing of collections is an essential feature. For my situation, any software solution must include the ability to collaborate effectively and remotely.”

So what is Rick’s biggest peeve? Performance.

“I’m using Chandler to increase my productivity, but that won’t happen if I’m stuck waiting for Chandler to respond to a mouse click. I simply don’t have time to waste and, as much as I love Chandler, will eventually switch applications rather than see my productivity tank.”

User Laura Garcia recently wrote into the Chandler-Users List with the following (bolding and large-type, mine):

…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:

Chandler 0.7.6 features the ability to keep multiple items open in separate windows. You can access this feature by clicking on the icon in the upper right hand corner of the item details pane or by going to View>>Separate Item Details. (You can also select an item and hit Ctrl-I on Windows/Linux or Apple-I on Mac.)

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.

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.]

From a recent post by Lisa Hoover on “Open Source Apps for Homeschoolers”:

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.

Full Disclosure: I am the product designer on the Chandler Project and I wasn’t sure if my role on the project disqualifies me from making any claims about how I find Chandler useful. Yet, truth-be-told, while designing Chandler, I had all kinds of theories about how people would find the application useful. But actually using Chandler day-to-day is completely different from theoretical usage. Anyhow, here is my experience of Chandler, personal biases and all

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.

So for some time I have been meaning to blog about how I am using Chandler. As a member of the Chandler team, I had been dogfooding (to use an old term) and using the application for some time in a work environment. I shared a Product and Design collection with my team so we could keep track of design meetings and tasks people were working on. We also shared an Office Calendar for keeping track of shared meetings and PTO. I have always used various calendaring and task management systems within the organizations I have worked for but had never adopted anything for personal use. Of course this doesn’t mean I didn’t need such a system. I simply resigned myself to emailing myself reminders, leaving myself voicemails and carrying around scraps of paper with shopping lists. Yes, I am also one of those people with a “huge” inbox.

Last July my life changed dramatically with the birth of not one but two babies!

I started out with just a Twins Calendar

Needless to say, I was going to have to be much more organized than I ever was before. I decided to experiment with Chandler and created a collection called “Twins” believing that I would never have time to use it much. We had just released Preview so I wanted to get on board with Chandler somehow. I was so sleep deprived that I couldn’t remember anything. After several lengthy “on-hold sessions with the doctor’s office to double check the date and time of my next visit because I didn’t write it down”, I started keeping a simple calendar with my kids appointments. Having all these dates in Chandler was pretty handy. My husband travels frequently on business so I would email him the appointments so he could arrange his schedule to accompany me.

But, quickly, it grew into more than just a Calendar

As anybody with kids will know, you very quickly expand beyond doctor’s appointments to new parent meetings, support groups, playgroups and a variety of other outings to keep track of. As time went on, I began to build up an extensive list of tasks that I had to keep track of as well. As a new parent, there was a steady stream of things you needed to buy and projects you needed to tackle. This runs the gamut from investigating infant CPR courses to ordering diapers. I realized very quickly that I had few opportunities to do things and I needed to be efficient about it. I would keep shopping lists for various kids stores in the city so when I happened to be out (usually at the pediatrician), I could stop by and pick up the few things I needed. In the old days, I would make multiple trips to the grocery store preparing for a dinner party. The cost of forgetting something was really high and keeping this all in my head was impossible.

I started to put any and all kids related information in this collection. I buy baby supplies online so I keep a recurring diapers.com order and add to my list in the notes field as I see supplies running low. When it’s time to place my next order, I know that I won’t forget anything.

I used Chandler when I was looking for a nanny. I kept dates of phone and in-person interviews and lists of associated tasks. I manage packing lists for trips, questions for my next doctor’s appointment and an endless stream of errands. I belong to a “Parents of Multiples” club that has bi-yearly consignment sales and a very active mailing list on which there are product and activity recommendations.

Why Chandler Worked For Me

It’s true that I could be using other applications to track all these things but there are several things I like about Chandler specifically. Since I am not married to any particular system, I like the way Chandler allows me to put my stuff in the application but doesn’t force me to process it in a certain way. I will sit down, use the quick entry field and just add a whole bunch of stuff and I like the fact that I don’t necessarily have to add any more info, specify next actions or make any decisions at all. I can leave it in the Later section forever! I suppose in some ways Chandler can accommodate my lack of organization. Getting stuff out of my head and into one place was a big step for me and over time has allowed me to create a system a my own pace.

Because I have very limited time, I use alarms for everything and set them for times when I know I will have time to act on something. I set alarms to call about appointments and activities for first thing in the morning. For items I buy or research online, I get pinged after the kids go to bed. The alarms in Chandler are not just pop ups, when an alarm goes off, the item moves to the top of the NOW section in Chandler.

When I sit down at my computer, I can easily scan my NOW section and see what things I can be working on.

Almost every night when I come home from work my nanny mentions something she wants me to buy or investigate. Now I have a place for all that. My Twins collection has expanded to include general family related events and activities.

Sharing with my Husband

Currently, I am managing my Chandler Twins collection independently. I email my spouse an event or a task. Although he doesn’t use Chandler Desktop, I see many ways in which we could collaborate together via the web UI. We have been working on a quick entry widget which is basically a portable web UI that can sit in a Web page. If he had the quick entry widget installed, he could use it to add things to my task list directly rather than telling me verbally like he does today. He wouldn’t need to log into the Hub and could simply plug this widget into tools he is already using ie: iGoogle. Ideally I would love enable collaboration with him via a widget that shares a single item or all items in a collection. He might also like to receive summary reports over email of the changes I have made and the new stuff I have added to the collection.

Wish List

The one feature that I wish I had more of is integration with my iPhone. Obviously, when I am out running errands I am not at my computer. It would be handy for me to easily bring up that shopping list when I am out at the grocery store. My current solution for that is to share my collection and use the Hub to access it via my iPhone from the browser. This is not ideal of course but it’s a workaround solution. This crystalized for me that if we want people to use Chandler as their trusted system for information, it’s important they be able to get at the data when and where they need it.

I would have never predicted that what started out as a simple calendar has now turned into an essential repository of information that I rely on every day.

A while back we conducted a brief survey on the Chandler users list. We received about 20 responses and collected some interesting data on how people were using Chandler, post-Preview. Some of the highlights…

• Almost everyone was using both the Desktop application and the Hub. Three people indicated they were running their own Server. For the others, we assumed they were using the OSAF hosted service to share.
• For most, Chandler was being used both at home and at work. Several people specified they were trying out Chandler with a small workgroup.
• Most people were sharing in some capacity either with themselves or within a small workgroup. Three people indicated they weren’t sharing at all.
• Almost all the users were taking advantage of both the calendar and the task features. We did not specifically ask if they were using the Dashboard collection and/or the triage features.
• Most people are using Chandler exclusively for tasks and calendars. Four people were using iCal and two people were using Sunbird.
• We asked people to list their top 3 feature requests and bug fixes. The responses covered a wide range. Features such as contacts, printing, free-busy, ACL support and performance came up multiple times.

This survey confirmed much of the information we have extracted from the users list and continue to feed into our planning process for future releases. We will follow-up with more surveys in the next couple of months to see how people’s usage patterns may have changed over time and check in on new users that have come on board. Based on these results, we have a number of more detailed follow-up questions we want to ask around the differences between home and work usage as well as specifics concerning the triage features.

A recent blog post by Eugene Kim effectively articulates what Chandler is to him and how it fits into his day-to-day work life. It’s really great to hear this in the words of a user.

This kind of blog post from active users really helps us craft our product message and prioritize the work we need to do to get to a 1.0.

Chandler has been an experimentally usable calendar since our 0.5 release. In the last 2 releases, it has been enhanced, polished and fine-tuned to the extent that the Calendar application in Chandler is absolutely usable now for day-to-day scheduling needs. With a fervent attempt to “eat our own dogfood”, we initiated the effort of using Chandler to maintain a shared QA calendar within team on Hub. The work flows spanned across features, going beyond just using the calendar application. Here are some of the heavily used work flows:

1. Scheduling meetings: Our QA staff meetings, IRC QA sessions, Bug Councils, 1-1s, and some special one-off meetings were all scheduled on the shared QA calendar on Hub. Some of the meetings were scheduled through the Hub web UI as well. The frequency of the meetings spanned from weekly, biweekly and monthly.

2. Sending meeting agendas: I would add the agenda for the upcoming QA staff meeting in the notes section, stamp it as mail and send it out to the team. We now have the affordance of updating only a single instance of a series and emailing it.

3. Updating shared events: Occasionally team members would update the agenda for the staff meeting by adding additional items and hitting Update. This would automatically bring the newly updated items into the NOW section of the Dashboard for immediate perusal. Also if the item was stamped as mail, a mail copy would be sent to the people in the address fields.

4. Adding to the task list: Outstanding action items for the team were added as tasks in the shared calendar. Tasks were often stamped as mail and sent to team members.

5. Triaging items in the Dashboard: We heavily used the Dashboard for triaging tasks and events within the team. When certain tasks were done, team members would mark it DONE and everyone would see its status in their own Chandler Dashboard. It would again, automatically pop into the NOW section of their Dashboard for grabbing immediate attention.

6. Using the ticketed view of the calendar: Team members, when traveling or working remotely would use the ticketed view of the calendar for updating events from the web UI.

All-in-all it was a very positive experience. We uncovered bugs that would have purely surfaced in day-to-day usage of the app. It helped bring some usability issues back on the design lists and more importantly helped us collaborate efficiently within the QA team.