[chandler-users] task handling

[Mimi Yin]

Hi Chris,

I'm glad you posted this question to the Users list as I am sure that  
there will be others wondering the same thing.

You could say that everything we've done since 0.6 has been about  
task management, but task management from the perspective of users  
who use their Email Inbox to manage their tasks.

Chandler's task management features include:

1. Drag emails from your email client into Chandler by setting up  
special Chandler IMAP folders.

2. Mark emails and notes as tasks to add them to your task list. (aka  
Stamping)

3. Schedule tasks on your calendar. Tasks on your Calendar might be  
milestone date, a due date or a do-on date. (aka Stamping) We found a  
lot of people essentially managed Task dates on their Calendar.

4. Triage tasks (and all other items for that matter) by marking them  
NOW, DONE or LATER.

5. Add ticklers to tasks, as well as notes, messages and events.  
(Basically alarms for everything.) Tickled items automatically pop  
back into NOW and are a way to re-focus your attention on a task that  
needs to be started on or revisited by a certain date. Ticklers could  
also be used as milestone or due dates if you don't want Tasks  
cluttering up your calendar.

6. Integrated Task Management and Calendaring
+ Tasks and Events can be managed from a single view: Triage Table View
+ Recurring events can be managed from the Triage Table View as well

This gives you a tru-er reflection of what you have on a given day by  
listing both your meetings and the tasks you've decided to focus on  
in one place.

7. We don't have tagging yet, but you can create collections in the  
sidebar and add items to as many collections as you want. I believe a  
couple of our very early users have been modelling GTD @contexts with  
collections.

8. Collaboration
Sharing collections which include tasks and calendar events is one  
obvious feature.

Perhaps something less obvious is that we found people sometimes send  
lists of tasks to each other and update status on individual sub- 
tasks with a lot of back and forth via email. We hope to support this  
better with our Edit/Update functionality.  You can send email, but  
anyone using Chandler Desktop can edit it and resend updates. (This  
is all done via Email, sharing via Chandler Server is not required,  
but it also works with sharing.)

Does this begin to answer your question? I realize that Chandler does  
not map to what people usually expect in a Task Manager. But our  
starting premise was that Task Managers are generally under-used  
(with good reason) and in our quest to map Chandler's Task Management  
workflows to how people already manage tasks today, we've ended up  
with an application that isn't easily recognizable as a task manager.

Please don't hesitate to post more questions. We hope to have our Get  
Started Guide and Screencasts ready in the next couple of weeks and  
hopefully that will help clarify how Chandler can be used as a Task  
Manager.

Thx!

Mimi


On Aug 6, 2007, at 2:55 PM, Chris Haumesser wrote:

> Hey everyone -
>
> I'm pleased to see that everything is coming together nicely with  
> Chandler and
> Cosmo.
>
> One of my greatest needs is an effective, gtd-style task management  
> system.
> I've been experimenting with pygtd, and syncing it to various  
> places with
> unison.  This has pretty decent functionality, but the clunkiness  
> and visual
> monotony of text files leaves a lot to be desired.
>
> I've also used some nice webapps, but I need something that I can  
> use offline,
> and preferably something I can sync to multiple locations.
>
> All of this is a lead-in to my question: what is envisioned for task
> management in Chandler, and in what timeframe?
>
> I know that I can mark an item as a task, but I can't seem to do  
> much with it
> besides that.  Tagging, task dependencies, priority, importance,  
> etc. are
> apparently not yet implemented.
>
> Are there plans to introduce more sophisticated task management  
> features
> anytime soon?
>
>
> -C-
> _______________________________________________
> chandler-users mailing list
> chandler-users at osafoundation.org
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/chandler-users