Re: What's the 'pony in the product'?

At 02:06 PM 12/27/2007 -0500, Andre Mueninghoff wrote:
>Hi Phillip,
>
>I, and I would suspect many others,  really appreciate your valuable
>insights in this thread about how to position Chandler. I am not quite
>following what you've written about Chandler and its suitability for use
>with the religion of GTD (love the analogy) and wanted to offer some
>thoughts. Echoing one of your comments, perhaps I also have a profound
>misunderstanding of GTD or Chandler (or both). You mention a LifeBalance
>application, and I'm assuming you mean the Life Balance app by
>Llamagraphics. Having used the Life Balance application for many years,
>I don't understand how either the Chandler app or the Life Balance app
>actively discourages (or encourages, for that matter) turning stuff into
>action according to the precepts of GTD any more than or less than a 3X5
>card does.

Lifebalance and 3x5 cards don't collect your email messages and 
encourage you to turn them into tasks without first defining the 
action to be taken or goal to be accomplished.

While it's true that you can enter ill-defined things into all three 
tools, LifeBalance at least nudges you in the direction of defining 
what place and aspect of your life those things fit into, along with 
relative ordering and importance.  Chandler and 3x5 cards have only 
the dimensions you define, starting from a clean slate.


>Might it be that a kind of philosophy/religion of Chandler Triage is
>what is diametrically opposed to the philosophy/religion of GTD as
>compared to the product of Chandler?

Yes, that's where the most dramatic opposition occurs, but even the 
smallest of practical barriers (e.g. hiding something in a menu vs. 
making it easy to access, let alone just not including a feature) can 
be a significant discouragement in practice.


>  Assuming even a religion of
>Chandler Triage that has influenced the design of the Chandler product,
>for me, to date, the religion of Chandler Triage is separable from the
>product of Chandler.

Indeed - and this is certainly the case if you use Chandler primarily 
as a calendaring tool.  And that's a key reason why I'm suggesting a 
positioning centered on calendaring applications, as that positioning 
doesn't require a new religion to be developed and promoted.


>It may be that as I use Chandler with GTD that I
>would be graded as failing to apply Chandler Triage.

Yep.  Of course, you will also have no more dimensions to work with 
than you would've had with 3x5 cards, and you will only have the 
minicalendar/preview area to serve as a visible "hard landscape" 
while switching between next action lists.  Personally, if I were 
doing GTD and using Chandler, I think I'd use Chandler strictly as a 
calendar, because I don't see that it provides any compelling reasons 
to enter tasks versus just writing them down.


>However, similarly,
>when I use Life Balance with GTD, I fail at making any use of the
>application's namesake, that is, at using the Balance tab to balance my
>efforts across the top-level-items (LB-speak) in my Life Balance outline.

Sure.  But LB, in contrast, provides lots of other incentives over 
plain paper, such as place-nesting and place-hours, which can be 
quite useful for a GTDer.  (For that matter, priorities and lead 
times, too, even if you completely ignore the effort and balance aspects.)


>When I was using only Life Balance for day-to-day GTD, the most
>significant selling point for me was that my information was accessible
>from the tools I predominantly used then, Windows-based PCs and a Palm,
>not the innovative tools intended to aid the balancing of one's efforts
>across different arenas of life.

Which is why I think that Chandler's useful selling points are in its 
on/offline+web, cross-platform, multi-protocol, open-source goodness, 
not in its organizational religion.


>  I like and use (in my own way perhaps)
>the Chandler triage features, but the current, most significant selling
>point for me for Chandler is the CalDAV-based workflows for sharing of
>items regardless of kind, that is, not only calendar items, with or
>without the rites of Chandler Triage, or GTD for that matter.

Yep - which is why I think that's at least one leg of the pony, right there.

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