[chandler-users] The story of a new user

[Allan Day]

Thanks for your reply, bak.
> Just a few thoughts from another Chandler newbie.
>
> Allan Day wrote:
>> [...]
>> *Now*
>> When is now?! Are we ever 'in the now'? To me, 'now' says 'right this
>> moment'. But when is this actually the case? Things in my life are a bit
>> fuzzier than that. Philosophically speaking, the accessibility of 'now'
>> is an open question - are we able to access the 'now' as a subject of
>> conscious thought? I'd prefer something that meant something a little
>> fuzzier - 'round about now', 'any minute now', 'happening', 'soon',
>> 'today', 'in-progress'.
>> On a more practical level, the whole work flow thing isn't happening for
>> me. All the items in my collections are currently set to 'Later'. Again,
>> this may be a consequence of my not using Chandler's calendering
>> functionality.
>>
>> The imperative behind 'now' seems to be that I should have multiple
>> items happening 'now', but that isn't the way me or my work operates.
> I sort of had this same reaction, but the fact of the matter is that 
> it's up to you to decide!  My workflow thing so far has been to have 
> everything set to 'LATER', and then bring in a group of things that 
> could happen today, soon, to 'NOW', and then process them to 'DONE'.
>
> Basically -- do what makes sense!  The rules are not embedded in the 
> tool like they are with some other GTD-ish apps like ThinkingRock or 
> iGTD or whatever.
>
> As for 'NOW' vs. 'Any minute now' -- screen real estate is expensive!  
> I believe the idea is to just recognize the ambiguity here and use 
> 'NOW' for the sake of brevity. :)  Map it to some other concept as you 
> see fit.
I agree - there's no reason why I can't understand 'now' in a way that 
suits me. Except that 'now' does have an inescapable meaning in this 
context - the context of 'now' 'done' 'later'. I can choose to 
reinterpret, but only in a way which clearly goes against the intended 
meaning.

Don't get me wrong - I see why 'now' is the right word for many (if not 
most) users of Chandler. I guess what I was getting at is that the kind 
of work that I do doesn't involve much stuff happening 'now'. I'm not a 
typical user of Chandler. As such, I was thinking that it would be nice 
to have some other ways of designating items - 'soon', 'upcoming', 
'next', 'on ice', 'deferred'.
>> *Publishing*
>> Currently, I'm using the Hub purely as a means to synchronise my
>> collections over multiple machines (the web front end will come in the
>> future, I'm sure). To share a collection with the Hub, I 'Publish' it,
>> but it is unclear to me whether such published collections are publicly
>> accessible or not. The word 'Publish' would suggest that they are, but I
>> don't really want them to be.
> They are not.  You have to give someone a that URL with the long, 
> funky UUID in it, and also generate a ticket that lives on the hub and 
> allows people to see it.  It is analogous to the way you share 
> calendars in Google Calendar.
>
> But I hear you.  My solution is to run my own Chandler server -- then 
> again, I spent some time in the UNIX admin salt mines, so it was not 
> much of a time investment to me.
It's good to hear that it's not public.
>>
>> *The dashboard*
>> Why not 'All'? I think someone else said it on this list - a dashboard
>> is something with a steering wheel on it. I don't see what additional
>> meaning the word 'dashboard' carries which could be useful in this
>> situation.
> Actually, dashboard != 'All'.  It only equals 'All' if you want it to.
>
> This is kind of nifty -- what I've done is group stuff in collections 
> by context, in a GTD-ish type of way.  So I have a @work and @home 
> collection, for example.  At home I right-click '@work' and select the 
> 'Don't show in dashboard' option, and vice versa at work -- that way, 
> I don't have distracting clutter in my list of action items for stuff 
> from the wrong context in 'Dashboard'.
>
True - Dashboard isn't quite the same as all. (Though couldn't you 
exclude from 'all? Maybe that would be a little contradictory...!)

Maybe my unease with 'Dashboard' reflects the way I'm using Chandler. To 
me, 'Dashboard' means the place where everything gets controlled, where 
things are assigned, where I survey everything that is going on, and 
where that stuff gets managed. But that's not what I use Chandler for. I 
use it to manage a very discrete set of items; two or three lists, 
essentially. To me, it's a tool with a specific, rather than a general, 
purpose, and no me, 'all' communicates this in a way that 'Dashboard' 
doesn't.

I'm not writing this to say 'this is how I think Chandler should be'. I 
realise that there must be a lot of that already! All I'm saying is that 
in my particular case - my particular use of Chandler - these are the 
things that I (rightly or wrongly) encountered. That's as far as it goes. :)

Allan