We've been working under the assumption that we would need to differentiate between Processing items (ie. items that have a Triage status life cycle) and Resource items (ie. Contacts).

However, I'm wondering if that's really true and if perhaps we can have a more general model that treats all items as Processing items.

Thought exercise No.1 Is it necessarily true that it doesn't make sense to assign Triage status to Contacts?

Our initial gut reaction was, yes it's necessarily true. OR No, it doesn't make sense. However, there are a couple of scenarios in which it would make sense for users to Triage Contacts.

• Scenario 1 Starting something you can't finish...
• An unfinished Contact might be triaged as Now (ie. I know I want to create a contact for my friend Mary, so I go ahead and fill in all of the information I do know: First name, Last name, Title, Company, Email, Birthday. And I leave blank all of the information I don't know: Phone numbers and Addresses.

• Scenario 2 Using contacts to model David Allen's @agenda feature
• On second thought, I don't want Mary's contact to take up space in Now. She's coming into the office next week so I'll just put her Contact into the Later pile with a reminder set for next Monday morning...so when Mary's contact pops back into Now, I'll remember to go find her to get her info then.
• In fact, we could provide an @agenda field in the Contacts where users can keep track of agenda items for that contact. To begin with though, the Notes field is probably good enough.

Caveat I'm not expecting that these scenarios (especially scenario 2) will be immediately intuitive to most users. Most users will probably take items like Contacts and simply store them as Done items. However, the question remains, is there any harm in allowing users who want to, the ability to cycle items like Contacts through the Triage Workflow? And if there is, is there perhaps a way to tweak the UI so that beginner users don't trip over this potentially confusing power feature without crippling the content model as to make the feature entirely impossible? (ie. Set default triage status of Contacts to Done OR Make the mark-up bar something that users have to explicitly turn on for Contacts.)

Thought exercise No.2 Does this extent to other extension Kinds?

Looking at the brainstorm list we came up with for StampingRevisited: Triage status is clearly more useful in some scenarios than others. But you can always imagine that it might be useful for users to be able to designate any of these items as Now, Later or Done.

For example, an oft-used train schedule might be great to have permanently in my Now section. Or, perhaps I shunt it off to Later with a tickler to re-enter Now towards the end of each day so I can remember to check the train schedules.

If I'm a food fanatic, I might maintain a comprehensive directory of restaurants with detailed reviews and descriptions of what I ate at each establishment. In a sense, each restaurant item is to me what emails and documents are to other people: data I must do work on to maintain. An unfinished restuarant entry might sit in Now or get put into Later until I'm ready to finish the entry. A restaurant I'm planning on going to might get put into Later with a tickler to show up in Now shortly before I leave to go to dinner.

Certainly the notion that "I haven't started to" or "I'm not done with" reading, entering, writing, or simply processing an item is universal to items of all Kinds. Beyond that, it's also possible that regardless of how "dormant" or "un-life cycle" like we think certains kinds of items may be (ie. Contacts), there are useful ways in which even these relatively "static" items can be used as reminders in the bustlings of daily life.

[Taken from StampingRevisited]

• Communications
• Email
• IM
• Text messaging
• VoIP
• Video conferencing
• File sharing

• Tasks
• Agendas
• Errands
• Projects
• Shopping lists

• Time-sensitive Kinds
• Appointments
• Events
• Holidays, Birthdays and other date-specific items that don't actually take up any particular amount of time
• Time blocks for things like office hours,

• Resource Kinds
• Contacts
• Restaurant directory
• Accounts and passowords
• Schedules for trains, planes, classes (this is different from each individual instance in the schedule, that would be a calendar item)

• News Kinds
• Websites
• Newsgroups
• Discussion groups
• Blogs
• Mailing lists

• Document Kinds
• Text documents (Notes, .txt, .doc, .html)
• Slideshow presentations
• Spreadsheets

• Media Kinds
• Photos
• Movies
• Songs