Is your Inbox an unmanageable pile of information that's only good for two things:

1. collecting new email
2. targeted information retrieval (as in, search)

Do you have a trusted information management system?

Do you use your PIM to assess?
Do you use your PIM to prioritize your time?
Do you use your PIM to manage and plan personal projects?

How do you keep track of the things you need to deal with? Is this usually a very long list?

How do you differentiate between the things you need to do right away as opposed to the things that can wait until later?
How do you stay focused on the things you need to do right now?
How do you keep track of things that can wait until later?
How do you get things that you're done with out of your face?

Do you spend a lot of time trying to figure out where to file them? Do you have trouble figuring out where to file things sometimes? Do you ever fall behind on your filing?
Do you ever file something, just for the sake of getting it out of your face?
Do you ever use your filing system to manage and plan projects?

Chandler is designed to help you answer these questions.

Chandler provides you with a single collection point called "The Dashboard" for:

• Incoming email
• Email drafts
• Tasks
• Appointments, meetings, events and due dates
• Notes
• And eventually resources, media files, directories...any and all digital information you need to keep on top of.

The Dashboard is a "lay of the land" view of your data from which you can make minute-to-minute triage and prioritization decisions:

• What do you need to focus on right NOW versus
• What can wait until LATER versus
• What's DONE?

DONE and LATER items are removed from your NOW area. However, they're still accessible for

• reference (Done) or
• to evaluate upcoming workload (Later)

Chandler also provides you with Project views that are simply DIFFERENT VIEWS on the SAME DATA that's in your Dashboard view. Projects views allow you to step back from the chaotic, fire-hose of information in your Dashboard so that you can re-evaluate your split second triage decisions in the context of individual project plans.

Project views are similarly divided by Triage status to help you:

1. Evaluate progress on a project. What's been done? ie. What needs to get done? What's getting done right now?
2. Plan next steps and long-term goals for the project. ie. Start up notes and drafts as placeholders for emails and documents you need to write. Write down action items in the Project Task list. Set milestone and due dates and schedule tasks and meetings on the Project Calendar.
3. Triage the project plan. Once you've outlined the various aspects of the project plan, it's time to figure out what needs to be addressed right away and what can wait until later.

Once you're done project planning from the bottom up, go back to your main Dashboard view to look at the end-result of all of your zoomed-in-per-project prioritization. Do a sanity check from the Dashboard view's cross-project vantage point:

1. Have I taken on too much? Too many conversation threads to keep track of, too many tasks to complete and too many meetings this week!
2. Let's prune the NOW items down to a manageable amount of work.

Project views allow you to triage, prioritize and plan according to what the individual Project needs in order to get done on time. The Dashboard view allows you to triage and prioritize according to what YOU can handle right now. The end result is a PIM system (as opposed to a set of PIM tools) with a built-in feedback loop designed to:

1. make sure your project plans are realistic, given the breadth and ever-changing nature of your responsibilities AND
2. make sure your project plans reflect the impact of the constant stream of new requests flowing into your life.

• demo_feedback_loop.png:
  

Focus in on more than one project at a time to make sure your product planning takes into account dependencies between projects. [Insert examples of planning multiple projects in the All, Mail, Task, and Calendar app areas).

• demo_two_projects.png: