Background

• work on Actioneer software

Brainstorming principles and mechanisms

Universal Inbox Archiving / Reference Tickler file Next action Mapping where something is to what it means Process v. perspective (cohesiveness, altitude) Chunking up and chunking down Iterative approach Projects list Partial system is not a system Easy entry of information; easy access to list Getting things out of your head Dealing with information in broader strokes What can the brain do better than s/w and vice versa Have ideas frist, later on figure out meaning (CEO vs COO) Centralization of tasks/info; distributed cognition Feedback loops between info and action Consistent and complete info == more clarity in system Most tasks are really sub-projects Just because you can't finish doesn't mean you can't start Limitations on what we do: context, time and energy Dealing with distractions: anti-ADD Inverse proportion relationship between being on your mind and getting done

Nuts and bolts of Chandler

Ashwani has a Web-based tagging thing which allows the user to tag files, Outlook calendar items or anything, and share them with a team

High level user Experience

Responses from David: - You're allowing people to avoid making decisions about what things mean to people. They can stamp as a task and avoid making the "what is the next action" or "what does this mean to me" decision. This is what most software does - David's Outlook add-in only let people defer things once then they have to deal with it (and if David had his way there would be no ability to defer something without identifying what it means) - Building "defer" into the software validates peoples' bad habits -- allow and encourage them not to think about what stuff means. - How do I capture information that comes to mind during this process? I need to be able to throw something into the inbox bucket quickly without interrupting the other process I'm in the middle of - What does "Now" mean? Because I have 170 items that I could do "now".

98% of information science has been about slicing and dicing information, not filling in what it's about or encourage thinking.

Mitch: The difference between items that require processing and items that don't (because they're in their proper GTD context): you might capture that

If the next action is to make a call about something

Are we building Chandler for only GTD followers or for everybody? We can't design software that restricts people from doing something that they want to do. But we can make affordances that point people in the direction of the right thing.

Mitch: Based on this discussion, the emphasis we've made in triage leading with "Tickle" is un-GTD. Our description of our dashboard needs to be more GTD-centric.

David: If I were building this anything that was still sitting in the inbox for 48 hours that was not defined with a next action, I'd want the software to start flashing and beeping louder and louder until I'd dealt with it.

Force the question "Is there a project in this".

Separate the processing process from the data entry process. We responded we think we're doing that.

Mitch: GTD is about tasks. Other material is support or trigger material that lives elsewhere. But Chandler has email and events too. Our intellectual investment overlaps but there's distinctness too. Bringing them together is challenging. We can change certain parts of the virtuality as long as it doesn't require code rewrite.

Here at OSAF, every 6 months we do a dot release and part of that is asking which parts of the broader design are we going to realize. We always do that in stages where we start with embryonic functionality and move through plausible to dogfood to usable. Our next release will be a plausible dashboard which means that it won't quite be ready to use but somebody can grok what we're trying to do and see it as a good start.

Mitch: We are committed to helping people move towards better practices -- we're not just going to leave them in a jungle of not knowing how to manage their stuff.

David: One interesting thing we found is that general tools are sometimes better than specific tools. A loose-leaf binder may be better than pages with specific columns and areas for a precise process. People customize processes.

Mitch: Maybe we don't have the right set of default sections.

David: The one thing the computer can keep track of better than my mind or paper can, is what am I doing, where. People haven't started to make this functionality available. We did an alpha version of this where when you start writing a [note? email?] saying "Mitch would you please"... the system would do a whole bunch of active things: - put Mitch's address in the item for delivery - put it in my "waiting" list - when it arrives at Mitch be there for his todo lists

Another example when I say "brainstorm", the system would pull up the brainstorm capture functionality, ask me "how long" and let me go, and remind me when time is up.

Mitch: we have to align for this to be a useful process. I have an intuition: somebody who has internalized GTD would find those unbelievably sexy, productivity multiplying features. By analogy: before there was writing/printing, people had elaborate techniques for memorization. E.g. the Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. People could memorize the equivalent of hundreds of pages of books by mapping into a visual space. People who had mastered that set of skills were effective and had advantages over those who hadn't. I look at internalizing GTD processes through manual functions as being similar to this -- it requires developing an internal skill set and puts you in a power position. So our vision of putting this process in software is to put the process outside the mind -- in a natural way, make it easier for people to get to the same place as by developing that kind of "black belt" expertise in a particular system.

Because we can't do everything, we would want to accomplish that naturalness, before doing the features for the GTD black belts.

Katie offered these three goals to restate Mitch: 1. A GTD black belt can use Chandler and it doesn't get in the way of the expertise. 2. A non-black-belt, an ordinary person, is led in the direction of GTD processes. 3. A GTD black belt has their specific expertise augmented by Chandler software. Our understanding is we're doing 1&2, and not 3 so much.

Most people aren't going to use flat lists or Word to do GTD. They're just not going to develop the expertise.

Mimi: People aren't going to leave their inbox. They don't use tasks and barely look at their calendar. One person we interviewed flagged things but then the flagged things "disappeared" -- she never found the view where the application magically gathered flagged items. It's conceptually too far away from the Inbox, perhaps just too unfamiliar. This is the kind of user we're beginning with.

David: Most senior people even at Microsoft don't even use notes and tasks. What do users do? They don't have a model for doing anything other than Inbox, if that.

Mimi: Our filters (e.g. to see only tasks) are to help ordinary people do things they ordinarily wouldn't do. Filtering the current view to show only tasks is a shorter step than moving to a whole new view (an unfamiliar place) where you deal with tasks.

David: My idea would be three functions that could be software enabled - Collect - Process - Organize - review

The "Collect" process is the freedom to enter a piece of information, know that it's collected and it will come back in my face. It would be resident and somewhat visible to me -- not be absent from my awareness when I'm distracted with bright baubles.

Process is when one by one, each Inbox thing is put in front of my face for me to decide what to do, what it is. I can decide if it's support material, actionable or trash. The item is in my face to make this decision and then as instantly as possible would go to the right bucket. Of course "process" includes everything -- email, notes, voice mail, invitations. After "actionable" is answered as "yes" then you have to decide what is the next action, which then lets you decide context. Optionally you can decide there's a project or some larger problem or issue.

One of the reasons we set up the Outlook add-in to make people choose the Context, is that we found that this forced people to choose the next action in order to decide what context to put things in. We never found people complain about this, they just left things unfiled which was basically their in basket.

The Review process, select what level. Do you want to go 10,000 feet, 20,000 feet, 40,000 feet. Do you want to put your company's strategic objectives. You're looking at horizontal process, but there's also perspective. When do I want to see my major goals, vs. want to see my phone calls. Software should let me see those perspectives quickly, easily.

Email adds a different spin to this because email is often actionable items and you don't want to have to create separate things. That's a little dangerous though. Quick and dirty for lots of people is to create just two folders: action and waiting for. Everything else goes in folders you already have: trash, archive or spam. A big danger with the computer as PIM is that the user can always leave the "action" list out of view.

The problem is that a screen list never shows you all you've got. (real estate limitation)

Mimi notes that a) Our Collection box (the real inbox, not the apparent one) is conflated with our NOW actions. We did this because of the very problem David pointed out, that people will avoid their "work" by never entering their "todo list" view.

b) Our "to read" next action is conflated with our "deferred" status without a next action defined.

David: You're requiring people to think in order to decide if something is Done, Deferred or Now. As long as you're requiring them to think, you might as well have them take it a bit further.

Mimi: There's making people think, and there's making people Think. We want to allow people to make the smallest decisions they're ready to make.

David: Do you have behavioral data on how somebody triages 200 things in 15 minutes -- do they go through and actually mark anything as "archived" or "trash", or do they just scan for emergencies and otherwise not add info.

Mimi: Most email is not actionable -- it's either spam or FYI. You can select 10 things and mark them as "Done" or "trash" and this quickly clears the email inbox. With the 20% remaining items, you can do more complicated processing.

Lisa: What if when we stamp things as a task, we have (and bring focus to) a field called "Next Action"? We could fill that in with default text like "Read this" or "determine next action" and people might just leave that default text -- or if they know more they can immediately fill it in.

David: Lotus notes makes it easy to file stuff, so...

Mimi: Conflating "Inbox" from "Now" is a risk. We attempted to make things simpler and force users not to ignore their tasks.

Katie: We have data points that this conflating could be a problem. - one user we tested with absolutely refused to sort things.

What is in "Now"? - an email I can respond to in a half hour - a call I can make - Stuff I can do today if other things don't get in the way IF the "now" list starts to scroll off the list they should probably start to defer things. So it's not just the GTD list of next actions which includes things that definitely won't be done today -- it's things that the user actually might get to, today.

Mitch: There needs to be a distinction between the container where you collect unprocessed stuff, and the container with actionable, doable stuff. I'm 99.9% certain we need separate "Inbox" and "Now".

We are not going to have dogfood email for 1 year or so. We ought to think about designing something that gives us feedback about our designs beyond calendaring but before email -- something that's task-centric and people can really use for that. It wouldn't allow full email stamping but pragmatically, it could iterate towards full PIM with an intermediate useful state.

What I hear David saying is that tasks are too numerous to capture in a single list, so you make several lists. I've found that not to work for me. My hypothesis for this is that organizing 200 things into bins would make it easier to figure out which thing to do next.

David: I find that having an @home list requires very little psychic energy to filter out. If I'm not at home, I don't look at it.

Mitch: We have an opportunity to go another step and not put stuff only on one list but on multiple. And we allow more axes -- whether something's about your health, or your family, as well as whether it's a phone call or an errand or something to do at home.

Mimi: Addressing why "todo today" lists are useless and cause people pain. Because this is a PIM that constantly reflects all the things you have collected; as the "now" list grows, it's not that the daily todo list is out of synch with your email client -- it's the same thing. Deferring allows you to keep the "now" list small -- an alternative way to keep the list small besides just splitting into contexts.

Mitch: We're trying to build the right set of distinctions.

Katie: David is saying there's no one "now" list there are several because there are too many items.

David: Yes, there's a huge "now" list with hundreds of items, but you need to be able to quickly pop up a much shorter list of things you can actually do at the moment. Sorting into context is the best way to do this if there's only one axis you can sort on.

Mimi: Our "now" list is another axis that can be crossed with the context axis.

Mitch: I have lists for "this week", "unprocessed" and ?. New things go into one of those.

David: When I started this work, we worked with paper based agendas. People literally wrote stuff on pieces of paper and we created an actionable pile. We asked people how they could sort the actionable pile: by role, project, etc. The idea was that every day people would flip through each category folder and make a "hot file" -- having found the top items. But this required extraordinary discipline. Maybe the ability to build informal timelines into items on a computer means for a better way to do this.

Katie: One thing this is showing us is that "Deferred" and "now" have more in common than we've been indicating -- they're all actionable items. Instead of viewing those together we've been viewing "Now" together with "unprocessed"...

Afternoon: Mimi presented OneUppingNature

David: One south american 29-year old had his stuff sorted not only into context, but also category and size. So if he had eight minutes, at home, and wanted to do something related to his family, then bing, he had that at his fingertips. I asked his staff if he really did this and they said they'd seen him doing it for six months.

Mitch: Some of the tasks on this graph are really projects.

David: How often do you need to look at the project list? really only once a week or if there's reason to believe you might be lost and need to look at the high level picture.

Mitch: Here's a design strategy we could have at OSAF: We could give people an organizational structure and let them decide how to use it. E.g. an outliner doesn't tell you to put "colour" on the top level and "size" on the next level, or even use something else. There's not a lot of cues how to use, but OTOH it's really flexible. Tech people always seem to put their stuff in text files which are the ultimate in flexibility. We chose explicitly, a while ago, not to go down the path of providing simply a flexible canvas. We'll build in more specific affordances for the task at hand.

One thing has changed in the landscape that might cause us to revisit or discuss this: we can effectively develop micro-features out in the field (CPIA scripting)

David: Calendars work and people trust them. People aren't worrying about what they have to do at 3pm next Tuesday because they've placed that into a trusted tool. Yet many of those people are worrying about a phone call they've been meaning to make. I solved that - those phone calls aren't on my mind because I built a trusted tool.

- User research identifies the similar things people do. - But are the similar things people do good things or bad? do we enable them or discourage them? - We have to look at the purpose. E.g. some people do flagging and we can see why they try to use that. Another thing to do is look at what people put in their sidebars.

Mitch: There are deeply embedded social skills in calendars, expectations. When something's on my calendar and I've agreed to that meeting, I can expect the others to show up. There may not be as many socially embedded conventions around the non-calendar part of our info flows.

David: I've seen social conventions spread. A boss caught onto GTD quickly and immediately began using it widely. As soon as somebody walked into his office he pulled up his "Susan agenda" or "Bob agenda" lists to know what to talk about. As soon as they promised something he'd immediately throw it onto his "waiting" list. So immediately his people started buying GTD books because they were being held accountable to higher standards of organization. It spreads.

The system I'm describing is not "my system", it's mapping things to what they mean to you. It's parking things in places that have meaning.

Mitch: It's important to understand that we never make the user make the choice of "home OR work" but not both. "Email OR task" but not both. "Project A OR todo-today" but not both.

Katie: We understand that we can't make people assign a day to everything when they have to do something.

David: You should check in with the MIT media lab because a bunch of them have done techie tools to work with this. Geeks are lazy, early adopters and like closed systems.

Mimi explained spheres for altitude/perspective.

David: This is great, if it's not in your face all the time. If it's in the face all the tme people become inured to it.

Mitch: Here's a far-future idea. We need a notification mechanism for people to review their spheres and projects.

Katie/Mitch: Sidebar real estate is too valuable for things people only use a small amount of the time.

David: I have 250 IMAP folders in a perfectly flat list. It's all topical -- it has nothing to do with status, context or actionable.

David: You just don't always need to know what projects your tasks are grouped into. Sometimes you do -- we sorted a startup founder's list by what roles he was playing, so he could decide whether to hire a CFO or a CTO or an HR director first.

Mitch: Here's another idea to park: There's an opportunity to integrate a personal GTD system, with projects and areas of responsibility, with a personal performance evaluation system. Since I ought to be evaluated according to my areas of responsibility, that's how to coordinate between people and with my management.

David: In my work with individuals listing their areas of responsibility, I've never gone through that list with somebody without them thinking of some project that was nagging at them.

Mitch: It's my intent to use that insight here, to work with people to say go list your projects based on area of responsibility, do you have the right projects right now? When you teach GTD you're focusing on individuals, self-management.

David: I got email from a friend who's GLO at General Mills (Chief Learning Officer). I had one person handing his job off to another person, they were both doing GTD, and they both said their meeting was the most productive they'd ever had. They could seamlessly hand work off from one to another. But I think it's rare to find a culture with that level of responsibility.

David: I use mind mapping to map out a project and get a grip on all the moving parts. I pull information from that to determine the next action.

Mimi: When items on action lists can also live in projects lists, you can allow people to view the same thing from different perspective.

Mitch: So I decide I want to apply GTD organizationally at work, and I define that as a project. BFD. I want to get things out of the inbox and into action lists. What I want to be able to do is literally mark something up to make key distinctions. I can already tell what's processed and what's not. The outline doesn't show me what's what.

David: I think you did nail what the project is -- it's "look into", "investigate", a research project. Perhaps having project keywords would help you -- "R&D" vs "scheduling" project.

Mitch: If you know what the triggers are, e.g. the words "look into" or "talk to", those verbs are very likely related to the next action. The problem is that depending on domain the triggers could be very different.

Mimi: We envision having Chandler specialized for particular domains -- e.g. here's the plugins designed for travel agents.

David demoed his personal system

Datestamping: easy keystrokes to add a "today" date stamp to anything. This is so useful and it could be useful in so many places.

Doesnt' have a way to hook projects into tasks except knowing what the relationship is in his brain -- project list (56) is separate from all the action lists.

Uses MindManager^? to map out projects

There's an important principle around familiarity: people become numb to something that's always there. It doesn't really help to put a sticky on your computer screen if you just leave it there, day after day after day -- you filter it out very quickly.

30,000 feet means things to accomplish.

If you look at the geeks building wierd stuff who've become GTD fans, they're building tools which the GTD black belts always find out don't work as well as lists do.

Does it take too long to file email if your task management is separate? David argues that it's not a lot of overhead for him to file email to archive into his 250 folders because he has separately determined what action might be needed.

GTD Overview

David gave a GTD overview to a larger group.

Wrap up

• Mitch: There is a balance and a tension between developing the big vision (for Chandler) and determining the sequence of smaller steps to take next. Even with infinite resources, we don't know how to build the thing all at once.

• Chandler demo for David Allen
  • David understood mine/not mine
  • David asked for anytime events, and we demo'd our version of them
    • Next action for Katie: if we import then export anytime events, does the right thing happen?
  • David had an issue with the timezone feature, which generated some discussion
    • David uses the calendar the way he would use a paper calendar -- if he has a 3pm appointment in ny, he writes it in at the 3pm time slot, whether he is in ny or californa. If he changes his overall timezone, this moves the meetings around (unless we have floating timezones).
    • David had to renter a bunch of meetings in his palm organizer, decided to just not use timezones.

• Evaluation of the day
  • Brought us back to GTD as a process for how you use the tool -- may cause some changes to the design
  • Sets the stage for work we are going to do in 0.7
  • In general useful for the organization to get an understanding of the system overall