Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s bestseller: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People presents a simple principle centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. If you want to build a highly effective team at work, I recommend you expose your team members to the invaluable material in this book. The book discusses how to be effective in leadership, time management, negotiation, and most importantly, how to be a better person.

A few years ago, I read the book and used its material in the trainings I conducted for my team of software engineers. Now, it’s time to have a similar training at OrangeHRM (where I work now). So I started reading the book again to refresh my memory. As I move from habit to habit, I plan to blog about how to apply the principles in a software company.

As someone who plays multiple roles in life (including many roles at work), for some time, I have been trying to find the ideal productivity tool. Having experimented with many such tools, I am yet to find the perfect solution. However, the good news is that Chandler 1.0  has finally been released. Today I downloaded and installed Chandler 1.0.2 for Linux on my laptop running Ubuntu 8.04.

Chandler is an open source note to self organizer which I had previously tested a few months back only to find that its performance was inadequate for my purposes. I also sometimes ran into bugs that made it unusable. So far, I have been able to use 1.0.2 without any major issue. Performance has been acceptable, but the real test is when I use it for about a week and enter 100s of records. As an advocate of open source software, I hope the product has finally become usable.

Apart from Chandler, I have used two other excellent productivity tools. Both are hosted services that you can access over the Internet. One is Remember the Milk which has a great way to manage lists. The tagging is also quite powerful. The other is Todoist which can have any number of levels in a task hierarchy making it well suited for managing projects.

Getting started with Chandler on Ubuntu
The binary available on Chandler website was built for Ubuntu 7.10. However with the help of a discussion thread, I managed to get Chandler 1.0.2 installed on Ubuntu 8.04.

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