What we've been learning by talking to real users

Based on our experiences at this weekend's usability sprint and Chao's LPFI interviews, I'm proposing the following refinements to the Triage workflow:

Users showed a desire to shape the landscape of their life work beyond just triage:

• Big v. Small (ie. project v. task)
• Action item v. Passive item (ie. read or research)
• Waiting on v. Actionable
• Need to read
• Needs reply
• Need to file

Where do all these categorizations fit in? We don't want a whole slew of things on the mark-up bar. We barely have room for the 5 we currently have: Triage status, the 3 stamps and mark as private.

I considered briefly simply cramming all of these fine distinctions under the "Put on taskpad" stamp as flavors of tasks. But rejected the idea. Why?

Because the task list should really be a project list. It seems that many people keep time-sensitive paper or word doc or excel spreadsheet task lists which are really high level project goals for each day or week. They might include items like: Put together proposal for... They are unlikely to include items like: Pick up milk after work on Thursday.

All the little things are most often relegated to

• email (ie. flagging email, sending email to yourself, or jotting down notes as drafts)
• calendar reminders
• notes on pieces of paper
• stickies on computer monitors
• bathroom sink mirrors and foreheads
• and memory

Which makes sense. Otherwise, people's tasks lists would be hundreds if not thousands of items long and the forest would be lost amidst the trees.

There is a clear line between big and small and people want to maintain a separation so that there is somewhere to go that is high above the ruckus of daily micro-tasks to get an overview of their larger life obligations.

Ergo, the Chandler Taskpad should be renamed Projects? Lest we mislead users into unbridled dumping of tasklets onto the Taskpad.

Besides, we have the Dashboard view for the down-in-the-trenches view of things. If the taskpad was also used to keep track of small things, it would be unclear what the functional difference is between the Dashboard view and the taskpad.

In other words, since all items have triage status. All items are potentially mini-tasks. Some of these items may actually represent Projects, at which point users can stamp them as such and add them to the project list.

I can imagine that post-Kibble we will want to add more sophisticated project planning features such as the ability to create project plans that generate separate content items that are clustered together (see QuickItemEntry). For now, users will have to make do with writing their project plans in the notes field of Project items.

So the question remains, if Need to read, Needs reply, Need to file are NOT flavors of Projects (fkn Tasks), then where should they live?

Need to read and Needs reply should be flavors of message status. People are already used to setting read emails back to UNread and everyone keeps complaining about wanting more than a binary setting.

The Big v. Small distinction is made when you stamp an item onto the Project list.

Waiting on v. Actionable is hard. Not sure where that goes yet. Perhaps it's a flavor of triage? Maybe not crucial for Kibble?

Need to label. Let's assume for now that we won't need this. The theory is that labeling will be so easy that no one should be marking an item: Need to label. They should just label it instead. Also the hope is that with triage, filing will become less of a necessity.

Proposed stamping schema

• In - Unread (Unseen?)
• In - Need to read
• In - Needs reply
• Out - Draft
• Out - Queued
• Out - Failed
• Out - Sent

• Project - Action
• Project - Research

• Event - Confirmed
• Event - Tentative
• Event - FYI