[Design] Chandler as a Managed Workspace

[Mimi Yin]

Hi Phillip,

I think we are talking past each other. When I speak of finding the  
'pony' in the product, I'm not talking about how we market Chandler,  
I'm talking about getting a grip on what our core value is. These 2  
things: articulating the pony and figuring out how to market the  
product are 2 sides of the same coin. But I think it would be a  
useful exercise to try and isolate 1 (core value) in a vacuum. IOW,  
I'm drawing an artificial boundary for the sake of discussion.

We also need to answer the 'how we market ourselves' question, but  
without having a crisp understanding of our core value, it will be  
difficult to market ourselves and be sure that we aren't 'selling  
out' so to speak.

On Jan 7, 2008, at 12:40 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

> At 06:22 AM 1/5/2008 -0800, Mimi Yin wrote:
>> All of this currently is being done with text files and lots of
>> email. What Chandler offers is a 'source of truth' a single place
>> where everyone can work together. It's where I was going with the
>> idea that Chandler isn't so much a task manager (where tasks are
>> abstractions of the work you need to do) as a work manager, or
>> 'managed work space' really.
>>
>> The reason why we can offer this is because we're more than just a
>> simple list / outliner and because we have sharing and email. If
>> there's just a list, all you can do is list out the work you need to
>> do because there isn't really room to spread out and do your work.
>>
>> If there's an integrated calendar and email and sharing and a lot of
>> real estate allotted to the details of each of the items in the list,
>> you start to have a multi-dimensional work space.
>
> Note that this approach puts us in competition with intranet  
> software, CMSes, virtual meeting software, Lotus Notes, and that  
> thing that was made by that guy before he went to Microsoft...  Ray  
> Ozzie?    What was that thing he had that was a sharing platform?   
> Groove, or something like that?  Is it still around?
>
> One of the very first problems we'll hit in that space is that our  
> conflict resolution isn't fine-grained enough to support this kind  
> of collaboration unless it's synchronous or there's just one person  
> managing a given project.  (And the second problem we'll hit is  
> that most people's real tasks involve richer documents than a large  
> plain-text field.)
>
>
>> But, do these things need to happen in order? Should you only work on
>> these one at a time? Instead of creating 5 tasks and tracking them
>> all, why not just have a single event item that represents the
>> meeting and simply DO (on that meeting item) what needs to be done to
>> set up this meeting?

Well, there can also be the opposite problem of over-specifying or  
over-planning...obscuring what you need to do with what your  
speculate you need to do.

To be clear, I'm not arguing *against* clarifying what you need to do  
and there are things we can do to help users do this with their  
projects. (Although to be honest, I think there is only so much  
software can do in this department, even if we implement clusters,  
etc. You really need users to buy in to a philosophy and that's where  
people like David Allen come in. If you're designing software for GTD  
practitioners, e.g. OmniFocus, sure, but if you're designing for a  
broader audience...)

But that's not Chandler's current core value. What we're better at  
right now (and generally speaking, what software is better at doing)  
is enabling people to *do* the various tasks that other task  
management systems help you define/keep track of:
+ Collaborating with others via sharing
+ Broadcasting information via email
+ Defining timeframes by adding items to the calendar or assigning  
ticker alarms
+ Brainstorming ideas and maintaining lists in the Notes field

Mostly Chandler provides you with somewhere you can dump, manage and  
work out ideas / thoughts /
concerns / issues. IOW, it's *not* just a place to manage lists of  
tasks.

Why do I think this approach is a good one? I think it's a good one  
because I believe this balance of managing and doing is precisely  
what makes people crazy about doing everything in email. (e.g. Your  
Drafts folder is not just a way to track the drafts you need to  
write, it's also where you write them!)

Are there things we can and must do to clarify this offering? YES!  
But if I were to try and put into words what we've accomplished thus  
far, I would say that we have the basic pieces / infrastructure to  
provide a managed workspace to knowledge workers. For some set of  
people, what we have today is enough to be useful and usable. The  
challenge ahead of us, is to broaden that group of people.

Now this is just a description of how Chandler can be useful to people.

What kinds of users will actually come and use the product and for  
what reasons is a different question.

> FYI, David Allen's answer to this question is that if you only have  
> "the meeting" on your to-do list, then every time you look at your  
> list you will have to figure out again whether it's something you  
> can work on right now, whether you have time, whether you even know  
> what needs doing, etc.  Sure, you can click on it and look at the  
> notes, but then you have to *think* about it again.  In contrast,  
> having a list with only actionable items allows you to focus on  
> acting instead of thinking.

Again, I'm not arguing against the benefits of providing users with  
affordances for getting more specific re: what they need to do. But I  
question the idea that Chandler doesn't already provide something  
useful to people in the 'productivity' genre by having better  
affordances for doing tasks.

To me, it takes more time to have a task representation of:  
Brainstorm ideas for meeting...and then hunt through your email to  
see what ideas you sent out to others, then find their replies to see  
what ideas they added and then finally cut and paste it all back into  
the meeting event on your calendar, which you also have to find.

In Chandler, all these things can be accessed from the 1 meeting item.

>
> This makes a huge difference in productivity, because thinking  
> about stuff is NOT conducive to actually *doing* stuff.  There is  
> mental overhead in switching from thinking to doing and vice versa,  
> and it often exceeds the time needed to actually *do* the things.
>
> So the goal of separating definition and doing is that seeing and  
> doing only defined things allows you to get into a "flow" state.
>
> That's the "pony" in GTD: that when you have clarity, you can have  
> flow.  This clarity does *not* come merely from having a "source of  
> truth"; it also requires that random "stuff" be turned into  
> specific actions (which can be done immediately if they are  
> sufficiently brief), and that *only* defined things are in your "now".
>
> The fact that most people don't do this is not a "problem" to be  
> fixed -- just an opportunity to have a new and more pleasant  
> experience of one's work.  :)
>
> (And thus, I might add, is a selling point for any GTD-oriented app  
> that can "tell and sell" the idea, showing how the tool actively  
> supports that goal.)
>
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