Mimi Yin wrote:
Hi Keith,
When/if you get a chance, it would be really great if you shared with
the list more details about how you're using Chandler. Are you
sharing? Are you using email in any way? Do you use the calendar
primarily or are you also tracking tasks and notes? What views do you
find yourself using the most? What features in particular do you feel
like 'work the way you do'.
Don't want to overwhelm you with a barrage of questions, but it would
be enormously helpful to get an idea of how you're using Chandler
day-to-day.
Thanks!
Mimi
Mimi (and list!),
OK... Let's start with a bit about me. Currently holding down a day job
whilst building a small one-to-one PC support business. Meanwhile at
home we run a Bed & Breakfast, mostly my wife's business but it's
something else to track. Migrated to Chandler on the demise of my latest
Palm, currently published from my tablet PC and subscribed to on every
other machine - desktop in study, wife's PC, and my Samsung Q1 UMPC,
which is fast becoming my day-to-day Chandler machine, as it's small
enough for easy field use, and resumes from standby in a few seconds,
unlike my tablet which wakes randomly from standby and so has to be
hibernated when not in use, making it too slow for quick task notes and
appointments.
My needs - a loose adherence to GtD, which I'm steadily tightening. On
the Palm, I already used categories extensively, so collections made for
an easy transition. I need to be able to arrange my support appointments
around the 'day job', and also schedule social and other events for
times when we don't have guests at home, so overlaying the various
collections is a great way to mix & match to suit my needs. I also need
to manage the usual myriad tasks, order items for customers, track
outstanding deliveries - the usual suspects.
There are only the two of us collaborating, so my use of that side of
Chandler is limited, but I find it very useful that Beth can see my
appointments and update them as she takes bookings, and vice versa.
As I'm planning on leaving the day job at the end of November, it's also
good to be able to keep a collection that can be ceremonially deleted
then...
I have collections for:
Home - self-explanatory
People - recurring reminders of birthdays and the like, plus
'people-related' tasks
B&B - guests' bookings
Work - anything day job
Support - anything support-related
Wife - predominantly firm appointments I need to know about, which
she updates herself - in the old days, these would have been beamed from
her Palm to my Palm, now they're entered in Chandler and synced
Music & Entertainment - gigs, films, social stuff
plus GtD contexts - calls, errands, awaiting, computer (actually more
like @internet)
Most work comes in either via the phone or by email. Email appointments
and would-be tasks get either copied or moved into the appropriate
Chandler IMAP folder, simple and very effective.
For phone calls, I make a lot of use of Micro$oft OneNote - great for
handwriting notes as conversations are taking place, without having to
transcribe bits of paper later. Fortunately my handwriting is good
enough for OneNote to pretty much recognise without error. When a
OneNote item needs to become a task, I've written a small kludgy
AutoHotKey script which copies it, flips to Chandler, prompts for a
collection and then pastes the text into a new task (and has just
reminded me of a tiny buglet, which I'll post separately). The task can
then be stamped as required.
Normal routine involves a lot of calendar use, shuffling appointments,
taking bookings, dealing with sales reps in the day job. This is where
month view or, better, multi-week view would be a boon - dragging an
appointment from one week to the next, instead of having to highlight
and alter dates (pop-up calendar would be nice). I know both of these
have been discussed, so I won't labour the point, save to say that it's
things like entering dates, something that I do many tens of times a
day, that at the moment can make Chandler feel clunky. The same applies
to the 'Go to date' feature, useful but fiddly at present, both of these
perhaps in part due to my using tablet and UMPC in slate mode - an
interface that allowed a few simple taps and no typing would be a big
improvement.
On the other hand, triage is so simple and effective that it's already
made Chandler my organisational tool of choice. Any spare five minutes
will see me in triage table view, reviewing Now then, time permitting,
Later. Again, the already discussed issue of sorting of Later is a
barrier at the moment. I think Mimi's proposal to sort Later by 'date of
impending triage to Now' pretty much nails it. I'm inclined to agree
with the 'Now' proposal as well: sort in due date/time order but float
changed items to the top for immediate attention.
I'm not a great fan of the 'auto-triage to Done' idea - I'd always
worry that something I hadn't notice would be marked Done without my
noticing it. However, disabling it for items stamped as tasks is a step
in the right direction. Maybe disabling for zero-duration events could
be included - I have a good few of those, in lieu of recurring tasks.
A few general comments:
Some of the 'clickables' need to be made to look more like they can be
clicked - I only discovered a couple of hours ago that clicking on a day
name in calendar view switches to that day in day view.
Many of the icons used, especially the status icons (needs reply, draft
in, etc) I don't find sufficiently intuitive. I find I have to keep a
lookup close to hand to work out what a 'clockwise arrow on top of two
blocks' actually means.
I haven't used any of the email sending functions with regard to
updating appointments. If I get a B&B enquiry from a customer, I drag it
into a Chandler folder to generate an event (<<Name>> double, 2 nights)
and wait for my wife to sync in order for her to become aware of the
appointment. Initially, I wasn't sure what would be sent to whom and so
we worked around it by just waiting for autosync to occur. I promise
I'll play with this more :-)
I think a 'conflict resolution' screen should pop up whenever a sync is
carried out. Because my wife only uses Chandler as a calendar, she
doesn't get to see the warning icon in triage views, which then stops
her calendar being updated, making us fall out of sync. A screen listing
all sync conflicts and permitting 'Accept all', 'Deny all' and the other
single-item-at-a-time options would be a big improvement. Even if it
doesn't pop up, some form of warning icon, visible in every view, would
be an improvement, bringing up the conflicts to resolve list. Also some
of the conflict message themselves could be a little less cryptic:
Rrule, followed by an apparently random string of digits and letters,
could puzzle a more naive user.
I hope this, my first full-length novel, has been useful. Let me know if
I can flesh out more detail. But it's 2am here and I'm off to bed!
Good night all.
Keith
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