Jinn of Quality and Risk

a klog apart has many interesting ideas for the evolution of Radio UserLand. Some are obvious and realistic, some are Castles in Spain. How should UserLand take into account requests for new features? how to make them visible, then organise, evaluate and rank them? in other words, how to let end-users directly participate in scope management and design? that's a revolution waiting to happen. 

Dan Gillmor: For more than a year, Kapor and his small team have been working on what they're calling an open-source "Interpersonal Information Manager." The software is being designed to securely handle personal e-mail, calendars, contacts and other such data in new ways, and to make it simple to collaborate and share information with others without having to run powerful, expensive server computers. ... An early version of the calendar part of the software should be posted on the Web by the end of this year, and version 1.0 of the whole thing is slated for the end of 2003 or early 2004. Code-named "Chandler" after the late mystery novelist Raymond Chandler, the software will run on the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.

Interesting. I currently use PalmOS on a Visor Edge to manage my todo's, contacts, and meetings; Palm Desktop synchronizes it with my iBook over USB; once I get a $50 bluetooth transceiver onto the iBook I'll also synchronize between my Ericsson T68 mobile phone and MacOS X. I use both PalmOS "memos" and MacOS "stickies" (virtual post-it notes) to take notes. What I'm missing is the ability to manage shared todo's and meetings with other people (I used Outlook/Exchange and Netscape Communicator to do that at various companies in the last 4 years and they were great time-savers) as well as the ability to display my schedule in multiple, meaningful, useful and pleasant ways. However, I've yet to see project management tools that seamlessly integrate with personal information/time management.

A problem I have is that none of the products I've used so far truly support my personal style of tracking goals, focus areas, tasks+subtasks, priorities, daily+weekly+monthly schedules, issues, and risks — a syncretism of life-, time- and project-management methods, developed over the past 10 years, if you really want to know. I always end up working against their limitations, so I've thrown a couple of handy, colourful, manually-controlled spreadsheets into the mix :-)