Group items tagged

Information is the substance of their work and more information is the output of their work: Research, proposals, priorities, direction and decisions?

knowledge is gained and shared

how people actually work

(too) many interesting things

There's something wrong with the way data

doesn't flow between the tools we use to manage, process, organize our information

software should be modeled around information

technological barriers

too much copying and pasting

false assumption that information management tasks are binary

false assumption underlying most productivity software that information and the organizational structures needed to manage that information are essentially static

A lone email languishes for a long time in your Inbox and then all of a sudden, blooms into an unending thread which dies down

the thread is revived and mushrooms into a full scale project

Three weeks later

you barely give it a thought

the same workflow hiccups show up again and again

an information management environment with built-in workflows that mirror what people hack together

three basic workflows everybody seems to construct for themselves, regardless of what tools they use

varying degrees of complexity and automation

These three workflows however, need to exist independently of each other

no complicated rule-builder

push-button interface

always assume a need for iteration and change over time

Peeling the Onion

Allow Organization to Change and Flow

the entire gamut of organizational affordances

Tagging

Filing, Rules, et cetera

won't ever be asked to decide between them

turn it into a Custom Attribute

Add semantics to a Tag

Custom Attribute

Drag a Tag or a Cluster to the sidebar

a Cluster: a way to thread items together, a way to reflect dependencies

Group collaboration systems exist in parallel with personal communication tools

does not scale down to work for small groups

the majority of the significant emails we send are sent while still in a draft-state

Future

a well-defined end-user information model

by modeling the user experience around how people work today and the substance of that work, we can be more than just another software tool and instead aspire to be a system for information management: A smarter way to work. A better environment for collaboration

We want Chandler to be able to talk to other applications

As we make Chandler's end-user information model richer, the number of interesting applications to talk to will increase. This is one of the many areas where we hope that people in the community will help increase Chandler's ability to talk to other applications

sends and receives email

sent from other Chandler users

downloads messages via 3 IMAP folders

Add messages from your email client into special Chandler IMAP folders

to download them into Chandler where you can manage them as Chandler notes and events

What still needs to be done

Sync IMAP Flags and Read/Unread status

Unlike "regular" email, you can edit and re-send Chandler emails

current target screen size - 1024x768 pixels

should still be usable at 800x600 pixels

the application

even more useful as that user pulls in other people to collaborate

We want happy users be successful evangelists for Chandler

web widgets that might be deployed in different contexts — iGoogle, Facebook, on an iPhone, etc.

widgets should be compelling to a new user who does not use the desktop, in addition to providing features that complement the desktop. Eventually, the widgets can be building blocks

misperception in the press

Being a CalDAV reference implementation is not a priority.

the Microsoft product with the most overlap with our design objectives is probably OneNote

web widgets (in the browser, on mobile devices and on the desktop)

not trying to be a GTD specific tool

Chandler’s philosophy is different enough from GTD that it would be misleading to call Chandler a GTD tool

Our best articulation of our core value to date is: Chandler is a way to manage and collaborate on ideas using: A List View built around the idea of the Triage Workflow A Calendar View Chandler Hub Sharing Service

the user problem we are serving is an emerging market

there isn’t a shared, public vocabulary to describe what we’re doing

Better product messaging so that people understand what ‘user problem’ we’re trying to solve and how we’re trying to solve it.

more ways to get data in and out

we will not be implementing CalDAV scheduling

We’re not looking to be a cheaper alternative to Outlook/Exchange. This means we’re not investing in support for free/busy-style scheduling. We’re not looking to be the ‘everyman’s’ version of Microsoft Project or Bug and Ticket-Tracking systems. This means we’re not investing in support for complex task and project management, e.g. task dependencies, tracking percent done, time estimates, robust support for assigning tasks, etc. We’re also not going to be implementing the GTD methodology.

the LATER section gives me that

I’m always assigning alarms to anything I don’t want to think about right now

my NOW section is much more manageable and I’m calmer

how do we grok, wrap our heads around all this data? (NOT just succeed in finding stuff in it.)

Search is not a solution to information management. It's one piece of the puzzle.

(too) many interesting things

There's something wrong with the way data

doesn't flow between the tools we use to manage, process, organize our information

software should be modeled around information

fundamentally non-linear, non-binary nature of information work

processing and re-processing information to help you stay focused on the task(s) at hand

everything you can't and shouldn't be doing right now

many of the messages we send are really still drafts

too much copying and pasting

organized around your data and the semantics

not around which feature you used to create them

or over which transport protocol

Not around which file format

new Kinds of Items

designed to let you re-define what it means to be a PIM

personal definition of "Personal Information"

Extend the existing schema of Attributes

manage (read and edit) the proxy list for a principal

separating these items into hard categories with totally different interfaces makes organization more, not less, difficult