Thoughts on Joey

• It will mimic Chandler to a great extent - many things they just got right. Eg, all items show up in one flat space.
• It will not have folders at all - only tags a la Gmail.
• Everything will first show up in the main dashboard which is effectively the inbox. There will be no explicitly named folder called inbox
• similarly there will be no Sent items folder. They will automatically tagged as "reference" or "info" or show up in the dashboard with a sent tag. The idea behind this is that there is really no other use for sent items than as reference material unless we're expecting a response and want to watch it. So the user has the option to tag it as watching before its sent, in which case it will automatically trigger a tickler when the user needs to be reminded if a response came, or a follow up needs to be sent.
  
• Projects and subprojects will be handled via hierarchical tagging, instead of the much more complicated route of have tasks and sub tasks. This comes from the insight I had that a) you cannot execute a project, only its tasks, and b) at the execution level, it need but just a flat todo-list. So taking the hierarchical aspect out of the task list helps, and we still retain that structure in the hierarchical tagging. So my strawman design for hiearchical tags is:

simple tag: home, fun, work
hierarchical tag: Projects. Project A. task1, Projects. Project B. Sub Project B1. task 3

• Bring ubiquity/awesome bar concept to PIMs. This is already there in Chandler, but enhance it to make that a primary use vector.
• Make it generic enough that the PIM can be made behave either like a GTD PIM, or like Outlook, if so required.
• Nice to have: Tasks show up in Calendar view if no date is provided, so that allocation can happen right there.
  

Design thoughts

• The core of Joey will know only about items and display them. The user can then setup a profile that has rule on what to do with the items.
• Items can be automatically got from an Exchange/IMAP/POP server or created by hand; and Joey will not do anything special with them like putting them in a special folder called "Inbox". Instead the rules of what should go where will be created by the user.
• Similarly the actions that can be done on an item would be configurable in the profile, and they're effectively two kinds:
  
• tag it
• change its type
• "act" on it. which depends on the item's type. For a mail its to respond. For an event its to attend and dismiss it, etc.
  
• The profile, therefore, will say the following:
• what to do with an item when its rendered on the dashboard - tag it to a particular type or not
  
• what action to take on it when the user "acts" on it.