Jeffrey asked some interesting questions about the user's mental mode of Stamping in his struggle to make sense of the Chandler content model in interoperable iCal terms.

The question of the day seems to be: what do we do with our Chandler notion of Tasks that have been put on the Calendar. Or Task-Events for short?

What is the semantic difference between a Task, a Task on the calendar and a Task with a reminder date.

A task is a task. You see them on your taskpad.

A task on the calendar is a task that has been given a scheduled allotment of time on your calendar. A task with a sense of promise and committment so to speak. aka Scheduled task.

A task with a reminder date is simply a task that will pop up in the "Now" section of your Dashboard view (aka David Allen's Inbox) on a given date at a given time (aka David Allen's tickler file). aka Tickled task.

Part of the theory is that "due dates" for tasks are hard for people to set, mostly because discrete, finite tasks with absolute deadlines are hard to define in the modern "free-flowing information" workplace. More often than not, due dates are really "need to revisit this thing by next week" kind of dates OR "will perform this task at this time" kind of thing.

For example: if you have a task: Write master's thesis. The due date might be May 5th, 2005. But you're going to want your PIM to ping you to work on your thesis way before the due date. David Allen would call this a project not a task. But given that many people conflate the notion of a project with that of a task, assigning dates to tasks will need to accomodate both bite-size tasks and project-size tasks.

Therefore, it might be more useful for you to set a reminder date on this task to plop it into your "Inbox aka Now section" at the end of the week.

Or, if you're really serious about working on this thing, you might actually block out time on your calendar to work on it every morning from 7-10AM.

Other tasks have appointment-like qualities (ie. Get haircut), but they're more flexible than meetings and events that might happen whether or not you show up. As a result, you really want to see these "appointments to complete tasks" on a tasklist, so you can continue to keep track of them in case you don't get around to going to the barber's as you had hoped.

See below for full discussion....

On Feb 7, 2005, at 5:35 PM, Mimi Yin wrote:

> No, I think it should still add location, end time and

> recurrence...the organizer attribute only comes with stamping the item as an email.

>

> The theory is, that once a user wants to schedule a task for a

> specific time slot on their calendar (as oppose to just tickle it so that it pops up in the Now sections of their
Dashboard view at some later date)...it takes on a "promise" aspect that is similar to appointments....

>

> Eventually we may want to locations for all tasks...but locations in the David Allen sense of contexts: ie. @desk, @computer, @hardware store, @home, @phone

>

> But it's still primarily a task and should appear on the user's task list.

>

> Does that make sense?

>

> Mimi

>

> On Feb 7, 2005, at 5:25 PM, Jeffrey Harris wrote:

>

>> Hi Mimi,

>>

>>> I guess I'm not entirely sure I understand the question. From the user's perspective, a Task that is not a Task-Event is simply a Task that the user doesn't want to see on their calendar.

>>

>> That's a very helpful perspective. I'm not sure I understand the ramifications of that. Does this mean that taking a Task and causing it to have Event-ness shouldn't necessarily add location, organizer, and end time attributes, because really it's just a Task that you'd like to have put on your calendar?

>>

>> Sincerely,

>> Jeffrey

>