So if I understand you correctly, your concern is that Stickies encourages the wrong kinds of behaviors? By allowing people to pile on lots of fuzzy-date Stickies, do we set people up to delay and perhaps never decide what their information means to them? Possibly No. 1 way to not getting anything done, ever in GTD?

I completely see where you're coming from and it's a fine line to walk when designing any personal productivity tool. How do you provide people with enough flexibility, such that they will actually bother to use the system, yet herd them in the general direction of more effective productivity? It was a recurring theme in our day with David Allen and we haven't quite figured out a party line on this issue.

However, a pattern has begun to emerge from our various GTD discussions:

While the core of GTD is conceptual in nature and addresses basic human behavioral tendencies and problems, I often feel the specifics of GTD methodology have more to do with treating the symptoms of the problem of human disorganization, not the problem itself.

An analogy might be: Having chocolate cake around results in over-eating for some people. But it would be very sad for everyone if we had to ban chocolate cake altogether AND it's not clear that getting rid of the source of temptation would solve the root of someone's overeating problem either.

In GTD, the resistance to keeping things fuzzy could be reinterpreted as simply an antidote to symptoms specific to a concrete and unflexible "information world" where:

1. a piece of paper can only live in a single folder
2. a note can only live in one GTD flat list and
3. pieces of paper and notes can't change to become other things

Which leads us to ponder: how would the GTD methodology change if it was no longer bounded by the real-world physical metaphors of files in file folders?

In Chandler, items can live in multiple places and items themselves can change (through stamping). Chandler items are NOT like the papers and manila folders in our file cabinets.

So now if we address two of the specific GTD concerns you brought up in the context of Chandler's "new world" paradigm, how does the discussion change?

1. Do Stickies encourage people to have multiple Inboxes? One on their calendar, the other in the Dashboard. Not really, since items live in multiple places in Chandler, any sticky you add to your Calendar would have a Triage status (just like any other content item in the PIM) and would be managed in your Dashboard as well with the help of automatic Ticklers.

2. Will Stickies just pile up into an incomprehensible mess over time? This is certainly a danger for some people. But I wonder if one of the problems with Stickies (both electronic and paper) is that they're great for capturing fuzzy data, but once they've been created, they can never become more than that. They can never become more structured and specific OR at least, it's an onerous process for you to turn a generic sticky into something that has specific meaning to you.

Which is where stamping and labeling in Chandler comes in. You can start out by plopping a sticky on your calendar for this week. And then over time, you can add specificity to the sticky: Tuesday, 2PM, with Joanne, at Mondo's, to talk about: new hires, etc...

= In sum,

The ability to easily"turn your sticky" into more and more structured data over time PLUS

The ability to keep track of this "fuzzy" data through Triage and Tickling in the Dashboard may EQUAL

A self-sustaining system that actually allows people to be flexible with data and iterate on information WITHOUT losing track of it and having it all end up in various messy piles all over the place.

At least that's the dream.

I think this gets at some of the core concepts behind how Chandler is a system, not just a storage facility.

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Some other things to contemplate:

• What happens when you're too fried to even process your Inbox? can we lower the bar of what it means to "put things where they mean something to me" so that people can make tiny baby step progress on their information, in only to defer addressing it at a better time (ie. tomorrow morning). Perhaps the goal is really to create an information management tool that let's you make and track tiny iterations on data. Perhaps GTD's strict adherence to filing items into one of the pre-ordained lists has to do with the lack of existing tools that can keep track of tiny iterations.

• Is Triage just for email? No I think it's a fundamental construct of how we process information. Mitch has a "Today" section in his Word document (which does not include email) in order to distinguish between his NOW items and the rest of his task list, which needs to be done at various points in the future.