How to deal with energy level & priority
 

I'm pleased with OmniFocus. It seems to work well, esp. for a 1.0 release, which is what I'm using. But I notice that a couple of things seem to be missing.

In GTD, we have the 4-criterial model for choosing actions in the moment:

1) Context
2) Time Available
3) Energy Level
4) Priority

OmniFocus has taken care of 1 & 2 well (setting aside the debate over multiple contexts). But to cover 3 & 4, there's only one additional tag we can set for a particular action: the FLAG state—and that's only a boolean indicator, so for those who like to arrange in high, medium, or low, they're out of luck. When I'm in a low energy state, I, for one, will not mentally process each of my next actions to see which ones are low energy... it's just too much mental energy.

So I have 2 questions:

1) Is Omni planning on implementing Energy Level and Priority tags into a future release?

2) In the mean time, what are some ideas for shoehorning these last two criteria into my OmniFocus GTD system?

I'd love to see Energy Level, at least as a binary. I'm less keen about Priority, but if it could be turned off (and adding it didn't introduce a lot of new bugs!), I'd be OK. After a lot of reflection I've come to conclude that my priorities shift too much for a priority tag to be really useful. But Energy Level--that would be nice, precisely for the reason you mention!

[QUOTE=abh19;33850]
2) In the mean time, what are some ideas for shoehorning these last two criteria into my OmniFocus GTD system?[/QUOTE]

Could you use pseudo-tags and search? add a "&le" somewhere in the action name for low-energy actions, then search for "&le" to filter out everything else?

Another vote for energy level and expanded priorities
 

I also would like an energy level capability, as well as expanded priorities.

Thanks,

Bill

Personally, I have no use for a Priority setting, and I'd probably only make limited use of an Energy Level setting.

But as long as they could be turned on/off as needed (like the Estimate, Start Date, and Due Date columns), I'd have no objection to them being added. Who knows, maybe I'd even learn to like them and use them regularly. :)

i would second the suggestion of abh19 too.

I like the idea of them being " optional " also .. there's some days I'd defintely pay attention to energy level and some days I wouldn't .. but I'd probably assign a value just so it's there when I need it .

I think you guys are taking the GTD thing down to a little too much detail. OmniFocus can't understand your energy or priority on any given moment of the day and until the build the "brain plugin" it just won't work.

I would suggest using your brain, a very effective scanner and data processor, to read through the contextual lists, and assign immediate priority based on your energy level.

That is, after all, the way I read DA to have laid it out.

BZ

[QUOTE=BwanaZulia;33892]I would suggest using your brain, a very effective scanner and data processor, to read through the contextual lists, and assign immediate priority based on your energy level.

That is, after all, the way I read DA to have laid it out.[/QUOTE]

Ha ha, that's actually exactly what I was thinking when I wrote my earlier post, but decided to try to avoid confrontation and soften my position. But since BZ is taking a firmer approach, I'll back him up.

BZ's interpretation of DA is the same thing I got from the book. The idea being that priority and energy level are nebulous, relative things and often don't work well as concrete meta data. That's been my personal experience as well. In fact, it was this focus on flexibility, along with relying on intuition to make choices, that got me hooked on GTD to begin with.

I would definitely agree with both of your opinions , I think that's exactly what David meant , BUT I for one struggle with always operating " intuitely " and sometimes get stuck ... to me it would be helpful to occasionally have the option to block from my view everything I know requires a lot of focus and not have to sort through all my " available " items all the time ..