
            A Product Review....                        TIME and CHAOS


                     THERE'S NOT A MOMENT TO LOSE!
                    Copyright 1995 by Frank McGowan

 Backward, turn backward, O Time in thy flight.

 Alas, much as Shelley implored -or was it Keats? I never have been able
 to keep them straight-, theres no reversing the inexorable transit of
 time toward its inevitable end. In a society with such a negative
 attitude towards whats gone before, as exemplified by the deplorable
 insult, Youre history!, the only important time is that which is yet
 to arrive.

 Time is such a baffling concept, that its been the subject of
 innumerable poems, essays, philosophical discussions, and studies by
 theoretical physicists. Why is it, as Einstein mused, that ten seconds
 sitting on a hot stove is so much longer than ten seconds listening to
 Mozart -or was it Bach ?  To the pragmatist, time and money are
 interchangeable: wasting time is tantamount to burning greenbacks.
 Businessmen/women would rather have their BMW repossessed than squander
 precious moments that could be used cooking up schemes for adding to the
 bottom line.

 It is no surprise then that the bright minds of the software industry are
 putting so much effort into designing programs they hope will appeal to
 the hard-headed strivers in the ranks of middle manage-ment. Not for them
 Walt Whitman's dictum to "loaf and invite the soul"! These poor souls
 havent a moment to spare. You could probably consider them "Type
 A-plus."  It is for them that the software sub-genre of personal
 information managers has been created. PIM's  (to use the current TLA)
 purport to help the overburdened executive do what humanity has hankered
 to do since we first understood that our existence is temporal: manage
 time.

 As you may have inferred, I am a hardened skeptic when it comes to time
 management. My idea of a nifty time management device is a pocket large
 enough to hold a bunch of paper slips with illegible notes scribbled on
 them, and a small daily calendar (for things too important to entrust to
 one of my little slips of paper). The little slips of paper usually wind
 up on top of my bureau in an untidy heap, anchored by the daily calendar
 so they wont blow all over the bedroom, thereby driving Sue to
 distraction. As long as the papers stay on the bureau, shes able to turn
 a blind eye to the mess, though it takes some effort. Nevertheless, I try
 to keep an open mind (why are you cocking your eyebrow, Sue?), so when I
 was asked to try out a time management program called Time and Chaos, I
 agreed. After all, I had plenty of time on my hands...

 Okay, I hear you all protesting: "Maybe you've got gobs of time to spare,
 but I don't. Get on with this! Please get to the point! Quit annoying us
 with pseudo-intellectual noodling. Is Time and Chaos worth checking out
 or not?

 Yes.

 Satisfied?  If not, read on......

 Time and  Chaos (or T&C) makes a lot of sense even to such a show me
 person as myself.  I like it so much that Ive stuck it into my Startup
 group in place of the Calendar file I had put there a few months ago. The
 only big drawback is that you need to have your computer handy to use it
 -it doesn't quite fit into my pants pocket.  Since most of you are,
 obviously, never too far from your PC, this isnt such a major flaw. And
 besides, you can print out what you need, stick it on top of your bureau
 and drive your mate to distraction just like me!

 The designers of Time and Chaos  have clearly studied their predecessors
 and competitors closely and have found a good balance between richness
 and usability. There are enough cool features on Time and Chaos to
 satisfy the nerdiest, but theyre only there if you want and/or need
 them. The Help files provide all the guidance you need to get up to speed
 quickly.  For the most part the interface is reasonably intuitive,
 although the Done button on the Todo list led me astray. I thought it
 meant I was done entering items to the list, but it really means the item
 has been done. The screen is organized nicely into four main sections:
 calendar, shown as the current month (upper left); appointment list
 (upper right); Todo list (lower left): and Phone book (lower right).


 The calendar section is where you select the day/month/year you want to
 schedule. To get to another day in the current month, you just point and
 click. Any appointments or todos for that day show up. Arrows and double
 arrows let you jump forward or backward to prior or subsequent months or
 years. I suppose if you have a major anniversary coming up in two years,
 it might be prudent to note that as a safeguard against letting it slip
 past. The backward move is helpful when you need to remember where you
 were or what you were doing at a particular moment on any given day. (I
 must be watching too much O.J.)

 Adding chores to your Todo list is pretty simple, and you even get to
 rate them from Critical to Work it In (my version would be If I Feel Up
 To It). Delete them as you do them, too, by selecting the item, then
 pressing the Delete tab on the Todo window.  The program even nags you a
 bit by asking Are you sure?  If you have any chores on the Todo list
 you didn't get around to, they carry over to the next day and the next
 until you finally get them done or, if youre out of patience, delete
 them.

 The Phone Book feature includes, among many pleasing options, the ability
 to split your phone directory into white and yellow pages. You can create
 different categories for your listings, to keep social numbers separate
 from business numbers. As you would expect, the program has an Autodialer
 function, if you have a modem. (If you dont have a modem, how are you
 reading this?) There are a slew of other goodies included in the Phone
 Book function that should make life a lot easier, if no less complicated.
 Theres even an integrated word processing function built into the Phone
 function that supports Windows versions of AmiPro, WordPerfect and Word.
 I don't know if they've thought of everything, but they've come pretty
 darned close. You can create appointment lists and move around quickly to
 set up schedules literally months or years in advance (for some reason a
 scene from Casablanca comes to mind - Barfly: What are you doing tomorrow
 night, Rick? Rick: I never plan that far ahead.) To enter an appointment,
 you select the day, then click the button labeled Enter New Appointment,
 and you're all set.

 You can also set an alarm for each appointment. After all, it's no good
 having an appointment scheduled with your dentist whos 45 minutes away,
 if you dont remember it at least 45 minutes ahead of time. You can also
 connect appointments to your phone book, so you can see all appointments
 you have with any particular person listed there. A feature I especially
 like is the Timebar. If you want to see how high your stress level will
 go over the next few days or weeks, or you want to understand why its as
 high as its been lately, click this Menu. Up pops a grid, laid out for
 last month, this month and next month, showing you your time blocks for
 each day of each month. The more blue bars, the higher the stress, at
 least thats my way of interpreting this data.   And its right there in
 front of you. One suggestion: I think it would be a good idea for
 different colors to be used, so you could differentiate good time
 blocks from bad ones. So, if Ive set aside five hours next Saturday
 for golf, that might be shown in green. But if Ive set aside two hours
 for a meeting with a difficult client, that ought to be displayed in red.
 One or two minor cavils: Why no shortcuts on the menus? Sure, once Ive
 opened the File menu I can see that Ctrl-X would have gotten me to Exit
 without opening the menu, but why no x in Exit now that I'm there? And
 please run the Spell program on your message files. Permenently? You
 may be hooked on phonics, but your spell checker isn't.

 Other than that, I think Time & Chaos is a winner, though I remain
 unpersuaded that a computer is a more convenient time manager than scraps
 of paper. I am willing to grant that it's a lot neater. It's still not as
 easy to stuff into my pants pocket, though.  Time and Chaos is produced
 by:

 iSBiSTER International, Inc.			CompuServe ID: 74017,3424
 1111 Beltline Road, Suite 204		        BBS Support: 214-530-2762
 Garland, Texas 75040 * 	                        Fax: 214-530-6566
 Voice 214 495-6724
 The price is $29.95, plus shipping.

 Frank McGowan is a computer consultant and college teacher. A former
 science writer, he brings his considerable talents to WindoWatch as one
 of our regular contributors.

                                     ww

