| Daniel, You bring up an issue we've been struggling with for a while, so I'm going to take this opportunity to talk about it, even though it's tangential to the proposal you sent out. We've basically come to some of the same conclusions you have (about the nature of Projects) but with a slightly different take on how to model Projects in the app... ====== HOW PROJECTS ARE LIKE ITEMS You're right in suggesting that Projects need to be "Triaged" just like items do. It would also be nice to be able to review your Projects wrt Triage status, the same way you do items: Active Projects, Done/Referenced Projects, Deferred Projects...etc (Not quite the 10,000 foot view of your data, but a little higher up than the runway, say 5,280 feet.) You may also have dozens of projects, David Allen estimates that most people have between 30-100 Active projects, so this doesn't include Archived and Someday Maybe projects. (Feels like too many to fit in the sidebar as collections.) ====== HOW PROJECTS ARE MORE THAN JUST ITEMS But Projects are clearly more than just Items as well, they have tasks and sometimes sub-projects. So the conclusion we've come to is that Projects are really a hyrbid thing, somewhere in between a Collection* in the sidebar and an Item in the Summary View. ====== PROJECTS ARE CLUSTERS OF TASKS AND SUB-PROJECTS What this means is that Projects are a lot like our notion of Clusters**: Lightweight, ad-hoc "threads" of items that live in the summary view and can be found inside Collections or Areas of Responsibility in the sidebar. So we can now think of Projects (or at least David Allen's notion of a project) as the "head" item of any Cluster. And the Project Plan (aka Tasks and Sub-projects) are just members of the cluster. Project: Clean out Garage Task: Go to hardware store Task: Galvanize cleaning crew Task: Provide beer and snacks Sub-project: Organize shelves of crap...etc... ====== ITERATIVE WORKFLOW: PEELING THE ONION Modeling Projects as Items that can grow to become the head item of a cluster of tasks is also in-line with our belief that users need to be able to process information iteratively and only add structure and complexity to it when they're ready to. A recurring GTD warning is that most things people conceive of as Tasks are really lower-case "p" projects (ie. Clean garage). Which means it's important for Chandler to allow users to start out with a Task and then realize later that there's more than one task to be done. So the more intuitive, straightforward workflow is to allow people to: 1. Create or Stamp an existing item as a Task 2. Later come back and flesh out that Task by spawning a Cluster of Sub-tasks As opposed to: 1. Create or Stamp an existing item as a Task 2. Come back later and create a Collection in the sidebar and add the Task item to the new Project collection in the sidebar. ====== This is the long way of saying that we hope to Triage Projects the same way we Triage Items. ====== ADDITIONAL READING I still need to write up a coherent proposal for Project Clusters, but here are some incoherent design notes. ======== FOOTNOTES: *Collections in our model are more like David Allen's "Areas of Responsibility". Things that persist for long periods of time. ie. HR, Grant writing, Status reports. Lisa had a good way of thinking about it which was that the Areas of the Responsibility you have in the Work Sphere of your sidebar should really map to your job description. **We've talked about clusters on the list before, primarily as a way to model email threads, but they've always been conceived of as user-definable groupings that can contain items of any kind. Our notion of Clusters are based on PARC's Taskmaster project and their idea of Thrasks. http://www.chi2003.org/docs/takingemail.pdf On Sep 29, 2005, at 8:05 AM, Daniel Vareika wrote: I really like the idea of a software that is more of an active assistant than from a passive one. It goes with the lines of the knowledge of a secretary. Someone who is able and capable of simplifying our work/tasks so that we can do what really is important/good at. |
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