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

[Pierre-François Gomez]

Hi Allan,

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 2:22 AM, Allan Day <allanday at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
>  > I write this in answer to Mimi's blog post.
>
>  Super! I also wanted to email about it.

Yes, she has a way with words that makes our mind "boil" with ideas ;-)

>  The way my work operates, very few items have dates attached to them. If
>  I were to assign dates to those items as a way to organise them, then
>  those dates would have to be fairly arbitrary (and more or less
>  meaningless). I would end up producing the kinds of problem described in
>  the blog post (items popping up unwanted in NOW).
>
>  Pierre-François, when you state 'just assign them dates', wouldn't this
>  be the result, or am I wrong somehow?

Hmm, you're right : I think I just overlooked a step that was mentionned
in the blog post (t'was late) :)

There were the idea of "LATER-No date assigned" for later items without
dates, but there were also the idea of "LATER-Not really" for items you
want to record "for peace of mind".

Now that I think about it (and now that I slept), I can already do that in
chandler :

- later items, with dates :
  -> it's not for now, but I know precisely when I'll have to do something
      about them.

- "starred" later items, without dates :
  -> currently, this would translate : "later" tasks, without dates
  -> it's not for now, but I don't know precisely when I'll have to do deal
      with them.
  -> in gtd "parlance", these would be "next actions", not the "someday/maybe"
      I was talking about :)

- normal later items, without dates :
  -> it's not for now and I don't even know if I will ever deal with them. I
      just want to have it written somewhere so I can think of it... later ;-)
  -> to me, this is the one that's closer to "someday/maybe"
  -> for this one, I don't mind if it grows into a big pile of items because :
      - they'd be tagged with other collections.
      - they're not as important as the other ones, since I haven't decided
        anything for them.

Thanks from prompting me Allan : I think I'll give it a try "manually" :)

>  An idea that Mimi mentioned in an earlier email would be my preferred
>  solution: user defined Triage Statuses. In my mind, users would be able
>  to create as many of these as they wanted. I like this idea because it
>  would enable users to plan to whatever extent that they want. They could
>  go for fairly wide, fuzzy statuses, or they could have very neatly
>  defined, narrow ones. Mechanism over policy (with a good set of
>  defaults!).

I like this too : the only thing is that it's all manual... but no tool can do
the work for you anyway :)

Thanks again

-- pef