[al_f]

ho ho. It's a very well-mannered war though. :)

[GeekLady]

I can sort by flagged again! Thank you!

[Edit] As holy wars go, it's been a very polite one. Someone break out the cupcakes.

[Lecter]

Originally Posted by GeekLady

Someone break out the cupcakes.

The Soup Nazi says, "No cupcakes for you, priority zealot!"

<said with tongue firmly in cheek>

[geoffmb]

Originally Posted by curt.clifton

Here's a crazy idea for consideration. (Please excuse my rough sketches.)

What if priority was just a little icon like the current flag and note icons? Something like this:
Attachment 258

Clicking the priority icon would pop up a little slider control something like this:
Attachment 259

Rather than being a very specific value in an A-B-C, 1-2-3 priority system, priority just becomes a point on a relative scale. (I think Life Balance does something like this, but it's been awhile.)

Now here's the crazy bit...

Suppose you're in context view and sorted by priority. Dragging a task to a new position in the list would set its priority slider to the average of its two new neighbors. Thus, rearrangements in context view would "stick". You could change the view configuration then change back to priority-based sorting without losing the ordering information. And like dates and flags, the priority information wouldn't be "in your face". It would just be lurking there if you need it.

This is probably too baroque for an Omni app. In particular, what should happen if you try to drag items in context view when sorted by something other than priority. But it seems like a fun idea to play with.

Without rehashing the debate about the GTD-osity of priorities, I'd love to hear what others think of this idea.

Outstanding!

[SpiralOcean]

Originally Posted by BwanaZulia

Your mind has the great ability to scan a small list (context) and pick from there what the biggest priority is.

BZ

The mind should not be used for scanning, ordering or reordering of any type. Software does a better job.

3 calls is nothing... until you get to 100 calls. Trying to scan those is ridiculous.

It's like processing the inbox. We don't scan the inbox. We take the top one and process.

How do we get OF to show us the most important thing to do at the top of the list so we don't have to scan.

[brianogilvie]

Originally Posted by SpiralOcean

The mind should not be used for scanning, ordering or reordering of any type. Software does a better job.

3 calls is nothing... until you get to 100 calls. Trying to scan those is ridiculous.

It's like processing the inbox. We don't scan the inbox. We take the top one and process.

How do we get OF to show us the most important thing to do at the top of the list so we don't have to scan.

This might be where the Focus command helps. You might have 100+ items in your Phone context, but if you focus on a particular project/folder/whatever and then look at the context, it should be a lot easier. When I'm wearing my graduate program director hat, for instance, and I'm focused on that folder, I'll only see the actions that are relevant to that. It almost makes me wonder whether OmniFocus needs another way to focus, so that you don't have to switch back to the Project view to do so. But that might be too baroque; the app needs to remain reasonably simple.

Come to think of it, a more robust Perspectives would go a long way toward solving this problem.

[HiramNetherlands]

I've been thinking this over once more, and if we can, at some point, reorder tasks in context view by dragging and dropping them, that will solve the issue for me. Adding yet another attribute to a task (priority, however prettily represented) will not.

[jelmore]

Originally Posted by GeekLady

Arguments about prioritizing in GTD aside, OF is designed to be useful even if you don't use GTD. As long as it doesn't force a user to do things in a non-GTD way, I don't see what harm is done by including non-GTD concepts.

I would wholeheartedly agree with you there. OmniFocus does just about everything I need it to do for me right now; if the extra bells and whistles can be turned off, I'll be a happy camper.

Originally Posted by GeekLady

[...] I should make the Payflex call first, it's hands down the most important. But if I have a long list of calls to make (and the phone call to Steven can easily be multiplied by 20, I'm notoriously bad at keeping in touch with people), I would like to be confident that I'm doing one of the most important things available for doing.

I realize I'm verging into "what does GTD tell us?" mode, but I think the key concept David tries to get across in the book is that it's all equally important in one way or another in terms of the mental resources it takes to keep track of stuff. You may need to call Payflex, but that might not be the call that you can knock off 5 minutes before you go to lunch, so it's not the highest priority thing you can do right then.

Still, there's a subtext that runs through the GTD book I try to keep in mind; you need to use a system that you will trust will give you the information you need when you need it. If you need task priorities to work, more power to you. If the Omni Group wants to include that feature in OmniFocus, I only ask that I'm able to turn it off (or not have it enabled by default).

[yann]

add me in the "if it's a preference you can hide and never see again, I don't mind" camp. For work related stuff, I rely on due date and time it takes to complete, the rest of the thinking is done by the GTD system itself. I don't have a need for priorities...

[aimee]

I'm jumping in late, but....

I guess my concern is this: If the beauty of GTD is getting stuff *out* of my head so that I can focus on what I need to do, then "how important these various things are" is something that I shouldn't hold in my head.

Otherwise, what happens is this: I look at a list of things I have to do, and I think, "Oh, I have to figure out what to do now, and I'm not sure, and I can't decide, and I kind of am not sure I want to do that one, but I really ought to, and maybe this other one is more important, and... oh, look, a bird!"

Deferring the decision as to what to do is, in some ways, deferring a very important and potentially anxiety-provoking decision to a time when it is maximally likely to derail me.

I would like a little more granularity than "flagged or not," and a little less than "an arbitrary number of decimal places." 1-5 is plenty. Just trying to get a sense of the difference between "this would be kind of nice sometime" and "this needs to be done ASAP or something awful is going to happen."

-- Aimee