[chandler-users] An answer to "In Chandler, nothing is ever overdue - Part 2 of 2"

[Pierre-François Gomez]

Hi all !

I write this in answer to Mimi's blog post.

Yes, I realize there's a comment facility in the blog, but I felt some
of this would be of interest to this list... and I'm just too arrogant
to spare you my opinion anyway ;-)

Mimi Yin wrote :
>
> "trying to balance "avoiding the futility of time management" with a need to keep the
> LATER section somewhat under control."

Ok, throwing "futility" and "management" in the same sentence was
really great to read, but that's not why I'm citing it : it's just
that to me, it's very representative of the kind of mindset I like to
"see" behind the tools I use.

I mean, the tools I like to use are generally both non-intrusive and capable.

> But I worry about going down the path of more granualar LATER sub-sections
> I worry about falling into the trap of over-planning,
[...]
> which again, results in big piles of items getting dumped into NOW when they're
> not ready to deal with them.

So do I. Tools that pushed me into spending more time planning than
actually doing real work all failed me precisely because of this : big
piles of items ;-)

I certainly wouldn't want chandler to become one of these tools.

I completely agree with this (if I read it correctly) : if you really want
fine-grained "later" items, just assign them dates !

But how do you distinguish later-items-with-dates from
later-items-without-dates ?

Mimi tackles this problem a few lines below :

> Instead, I think it will be more effective to automatically collect all LATER items that
> don't have a specified time frame (items with no alarm, no event dates) into a separate
> section called "LATER - No date assigned".*

Here I agree on the idea but not on the wording : personally I much
prefer the way Grant Baillie calls it in the linked bug 11774[1] : "We
could even call it "Someday/Maybe" :)"

Definitely Grant ! As much as I don't want to blindly follow GTD (or
to blindly follow *anything*, for that matter), I don't think it's a good
idea to systematically try to find another expression for the very
same idea.

Particularly when the new name is ugly[2] :)

Finally, Mimi, I'd like to point out an idea you evoked on the list a
few threads back, and which is remarkably close to your "separate
section" idea. I'm talking about these 'rule-based' collections.

Again imho, this would be a very elegant way to deal with this :

- have a new rule-based collection called "someday/maybe"
 - the only rule wouldn't be user-definable : displaying all later items
   without any dates
 - display it alongside "in" and "out", or maybe just among the other
user-definable collections
- obviously, when you click on it, you see all the "later" items
without any date
 - of course, there wouldn't be any "now" or "done" items there
 - switching an item to "now" or "done" would remove it from this
computed collection
- dragging an item on it would remove all date informations (same as
'remove from agenda')
- dragging an item on it would also set it as "later"

I'm pretty sure you already thought through this and that I overlook
something : just
drop in ;-)

Thoughts ?

[1] https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11774#c2
[2] no offense intended : "someday/maybe" just sounds a lot better to me ;-)

-- pef