Keep your life organised with Chandler Desktop

Keeping on top of a long to-do list can be a tough job. Chandler Desktop has some clever ideas that make it easy to use a single place for all your jobs, both long and short term.

Chandler was created to end the division in other personal organisers such as Outlook between tasks and calendar entries. Instead they are all called items and are organised by groups called collections. This makes it easy to see everything to do with a particular task in one place. Items can also be assigned to more than one collection. You can read about the development of Chandler in the book Dreaming in Code (link to book website).

All tasks are given a 'Triage' status of either Now, Later or Done. This is a great help because tasks can be entered long before they are due without cluttering up the list of immediate tasks. Setting an alarm on a task automatically changes the status from Later to Now.

There is an area for Notes in all tasks for larger amounts of text or for logging what you have done for the task.

The Dashboard collection shows all of your tasks. Collections can be marked so that they don't appear in the dashboard, which is useful if you use Chandler for both home and work tasks.

Once a collection is selected a calendar view can then be selected. It can show all of the collections in your account, so it's a shame that it doesn't work with the dashboard. Click on the coloured tab on the left of collections sets whether it is shown in the calendar and the colour it should use. Right-clicking on a collection gives the opportunity to set the colour.

Chandler is especially good if you work on several computers. The Chandler Hub service can synchronise tasks between computers and has a web interface as well. We have found that the Hub doesn't work with Opera but it does work in other browsers. Collections have to be added to the Hub manually. This may sound frustrating but it helps avoid clutter.

It is possible to subscribe to other collections than your own and not just Chandler accounts as Google Calendars can be imported.

Regular items can be created so you can mark them as done.

The interface is a bit basic and it can take a little time to work out where some options are. It is worth putting in the time as it is one of the best task managers we have used.