[chandler-users] Why the strange term "star" verses a known one "task"

Wed Apr 30 11:12:54 PDT 2008

Hello,

I'm a new poster to the list, though I've been reading it for a couple
months now and have been using Chandler for about three and a half months.
I did start with the earlier version that just had the Task designation and
later upgraded to the latest version that has the Star designation instead.
After a brief adjustment period to understand that the Star was functionally
the same thing as the previous Task under a different name, I've continued
to use it to designate tasks, or action items, as opposed to Notes, FYIs,
lists, appointments and other general flotsam and jetsam that serve more to
collect my thoughts than to point me towards one particular action item that
needs doing.  It's worked just fine for me in that regard and I like the
idea that other people who might be more likely to see everything as a Task
can just use the Star for designating important items and those of us who
might have a lot of other "non task" items mixed in can continue to use the
Star to designate action items.  

Ultimately, you can decide that the "Star" means whatever you want it to
mean and that's the beauty of it to me.  We will never have a "one size fits
all" program so the more of this sort of flexibility you can build in, the
more people will be happy with it.

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.  The single greatest thing about
it 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.

--
Laura T. Garcia
Director, Student Affairs IT Services
University of Massachusetts Amherst
319 Whitmore Bldg
Amherst, MA  01003
(413) 575-4765

-----Original Message-----
From: chandler-users-bounces at osafoundation.org
[mailto:chandler-users-bounces at osafoundation.org] On Behalf Of Sheila Mooney
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 1:38 PM
To: Chandler users
Subject: Re: [chandler-users] Why the strange term "star" verses a known one
"task"

William,

Mimi wrote up a blog post a while back that explains in more detail  
why we are using the "star" term.

http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2008/02/14/what-makes-a-task-a-task/

Through user feedback, we found that people just weren't using the  
task stamp or they have a hard time figuring out when to use it.  
Instead, we are basically making everything in Chandler a task by  
default since it's sometimes hard to distinguish when something  
evolves from a pure note, idea etc to a specific task. As you  
indicated, star is intended to be used to flag something important,  
critical etc - you could star and event for example.

Cheers,
Sheila

On Apr 30, 2008, at 10:07 AM, William K. Volkman wrote:

> The change from 7.4 to 7.5 was quite a bit abrupt, my impression went
> from thinking that I could probably use this to wait a minute, this
> doesn't quite work.  I've been through enough change scenarios that I
> know that sometimes one just has to learn and work with the new to
> discover the value of it.  Well after a month+ I still have no
> use/understanding of what a "star" means and I find that I miss the
> "task".  I have a conceptual block to interpreting "star" as "task"
> because "star" to me means important, a very poor and useless  
> substitute
> for priority.  In fact I find that even the icon annoys me and turn it
> off.
>
> I did cursorily scan the archives in recent months however the reason
> for the change didn't jump out at me.
>
> Please bring back the task, or at least let us choose what the state  
> is
> called and what it's icon is.
>
> Thank you,
> William.
>
> _______________________________________________
> chandler-users mailing list
> chandler-users at osafoundation.org
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/chandler-users

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