I'm trying to use OmniFocus after a long hiatus and dreading looking at my sea of tasks. I'm right back into my old problem of not knowing how to prioritize.
In my understanding of GTD, priority is simply the order you list tasks. That makes perfect sense within projects, which is the only place you choose this order priority. However organizing projects by priority is much more difficult. Every task in one project won't always be higher priority than every task in another project.
So how do I get a reasonable prioritized ordering in context view when I have tons of tasks with hierarchies of subtasks?
It seems having a separate order for use in the context view might solve this problem, although it could be difficult to determine exactly how it should work. Basically, I'd like to determine how tasks from different projects are interleaved.
So if I have these projects:
Take care of finances
- Hire tax accountant
Stay Healthy
- Get scary mole checked
- Make dentist appointment
- Plan a hike
I can reorganize those in context view to:
- Get scary mole checked
- Hire tax accountant
- Make dentist appointment
- Plan ahike
Obviously I could set due dates and sort by date, or use some other hack, but dates get stale and are arbitrary in many cases, and since order is core to GTD, why not let me order tasks in different projects within the context view?
Technically, if I reorder tasks relative to each other that are in the same project, this would also reorder them within the project hierarchy, and vice versa. This could cause OmniFocus to make some arbitrary decisions about ordering when something changes, but I believe that a simple default behavior would make this predictable and intutitive.
Thoughts?
In my understanding of GTD, priority is simply the order you list tasks. That makes perfect sense within projects, which is the only place you choose this order priority. However organizing projects by priority is much more difficult. Every task in one project won't always be higher priority than every task in another project.
So how do I get a reasonable prioritized ordering in context view when I have tons of tasks with hierarchies of subtasks?
It seems having a separate order for use in the context view might solve this problem, although it could be difficult to determine exactly how it should work. Basically, I'd like to determine how tasks from different projects are interleaved.
So if I have these projects:
Take care of finances
- Hire tax accountant
Stay Healthy
- Get scary mole checked
- Make dentist appointment
- Plan a hike
I can reorganize those in context view to:
- Get scary mole checked
- Hire tax accountant
- Make dentist appointment
- Plan ahike
Obviously I could set due dates and sort by date, or use some other hack, but dates get stale and are arbitrary in many cases, and since order is core to GTD, why not let me order tasks in different projects within the context view?
Technically, if I reorder tasks relative to each other that are in the same project, this would also reorder them within the project hierarchy, and vice versa. This could cause OmniFocus to make some arbitrary decisions about ordering when something changes, but I believe that a simple default behavior would make this predictable and intutitive.
Thoughts?