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Feature Request: task prioritization! Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I believe the phrase you are looking for is "ooooh SHINY!"

Quote:
Originally Posted by aimee View Post
"oh, look, a bird!"
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by aimee View Post
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
Good points, especially the part about getting priority out of your head and into your system.

I think the main point of GTD regarding priorities though is that they change based on context, current time and daily changes in your responsibilities that are beyond your control. I can't take any of my tasks and give them a 1-5 priority that applies to all situational contexts.

For instance, let's say I have two clients I am working for and each of them have big projects currently in the works. Client A is a long-time client with a very lucrative contract and they've brought plenty of business my way through referrals in the past. I like Client A and generally consider any project for them a high priority.

Client B is... well not to be mean, but they're a pain in my ass. I bend over backwards for them and it's never enough. They push me around, demand meetings on short notice for stupid piddly crap that could wait until next week and every other contractor that works with them (and by association, occasionally with me) has to put up with the same stupid crap. I get Client B's work done, and I do it as best as I can for the sake of my portfolio, but honestly, they're not my highest priority.

I have a meeting with Client B tomorrow and there's work that needs to be done before that meeting. The next milestone deadline for Client A is still three days off and I'm ahead of schedule.

Now when I look at my current list of tasks, it's pretty clear to me what's higher priority right now. Client B's work, as much as I hate it, has to get done today. But in the overall scheme of things Client A's work is much higher priority for me and much more valuable and important.

So the question is this: Last week, long before I knew what situation I was going to be in today, when I was doing my weekly review, which priority do I assign to these tasks, and how do I put that information to use right now today?

Do I put high priority on Client A's work and low priority on Client B's? If so, then when I look at my action list today, Client A's work will be at the top of the list even though right now it is not the highest priority.

Client B's work is the highest priority right now. If I'm sorting by priority, Client B has to be at the top of the list, but the only way I can do that is give Client B's tasks a higher priority in my system, which is unlikely to happen because Client B really isn't that important to me. They can jump in a lake for all I care in the grand scheme of things (which is why I should probably dump them as a client, but I should've made that choice before committing to the project that currently should be my highest priority).

Should I try to predict what I will and won't get done between my review and every day following the review so I can assign priorities to my actions that will work on... oh say next Tuesday? Should I just assign priorities appropriately in the grand scheme of things during my review and then look through my entire action list every day to determine if those priorities are actually valid right now in this very moment (which they aren't, and frequently won't be)?

I could assign a due date to Client B's work, in fact, I have. But that due date tells me everything I need to know about that task's priority. "This project needs to be done by this date. That is all." I don't really need to know any more about it's priority than that.

I think priority isn't something you carry around with you in your head. Priority is something you decide at the moment, and it changes from moment to moment. Trying to assign priority to tasks during the weekly review is like trying to predict the future for every future moment you will look at your task list and then choosing the one numerical value that you think will be accurate in the most situations (but unlikely to be accurate for all situations even if you do predict them all accurately). I don't remember the priority of my actions so that I can recall it when I look at my action list. I choose the priority of my actions every time I look at my action list.

That's the difference between GTD and other systems. That's the goal that David Allen is trying to get us to work toward.

Last edited by MEP; 2007-08-01 at 09:15 AM..
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by MEP
I think priority isn't something you carry around with you in your head. Priority is something you decide at the moment, and it changes from moment to moment....That's the difference between GTD and other systems. That's the goal that David Allen is trying to get us to work toward.
An excellent point.

I have, however, found priority very useful in my next-action review process. As I look through a long list of avaiable tasks (or next actions on many active projects), I may want to move things to the top of the list, or the bottom of the list. Dragging and dropping items on the list works to some extent, but I find it requires too much thought during review.

In iGTD, I like having a 1-5 priority selector, because I can work my way through the list once, tag everything with its priority at this moment, then sort by priority and start working down the list.

Dragging and dropping, on the other hand, causes the list to change while I'm reviewing it, which makes it a little harder to focus on a quick pass through the list -- I'll worry that I missed something as I shuffle through the ever-changing list. Additionally, when deciding where to drop something, I have to re-evaluate the tasks around its destination, even if unconsciously. I find this added mental load distracts me from quickly passing through the list.

Do you have any other ideas how one might prioritize a long list without lots of dragging & dropping?

And, unfortunately, OF doesn't seem to let me manually order my tasks in context view (which is where I normally work). It's always sorting by some criterion. Using the built-in notion of priority that Ken Case mentioned wouldn't really work here, because that appears to be priority-within-a-project; so these internal priorities can't be compared between projects.

This all suggests to me that there's a place for explicit priority (even if some people abuse it in non-GTD ways).
 
During the review, I think dragging and dropping to change the order of tasks should work really well. Since each project or sub-project is its own little list, prioritizing in each one shouldn't be too hard. If you have a really long list of tasks in a single project, that really sounds like it could be broken down into smaller sub-projects. I have some truly daunting projects on my task list, but after reducing them down into their component sub-projects, I don't have a single sub-project that is really more than 6-7 tasks long and most of those are sequential so priority doesn't even enter into it.

It sounds like a lot of refactoring, and it can be if you let it, but ultimately I think breaking things down into smaller chunks helps a lot when dealing with long task lists. Any way you slice it, prioritizing or even contextualizing a large amount of tasks is going to take some amount of work. By breaking it up, you can prioritize all of your tasks within the smaller and easier to conceptualize context of a sub-project, and then each of those sub-projects can be prioritized in relation to each other rather than in relation to every single task.

So there's a lot of dragging and dropping the first time you set it up, but after that, it's just large chunks of data moving as single units all at once as you drag projects around and you only have to prioritize tasks themselves very rarely (if you grouped everything right which is the trick). It's hard to say without really seeing what kind of task list you're looking at, but that's what I would suggest.

As for priority in context view, that's a hard one. I really like scanning my entire visible action list in context view (after it's been narrowed down by context) so I can actively decide what's most important to me right now so I'm not a big fan of putting the most important things at the top so I can develop a habit of ignoring things at the bottom.

I think the most important thing here is to really use contexts to reduce your visible action list as much as you possibly can first. If location contexts (@Home or @Computer) don't narrow your list down enough, use sub-contexts (@Home:daytime for yardwork or @Computer:Web for researching things online) to really get that list as small as you can when you're looking at it right now.

If the list is small enough, scanning it visually and deciding what you have the time and energy to do and what is most important right now shouldn't be too hard. If the list is still too large I think you need to rework your contexts to make it smaller -- which kind of sounds like a cop out, but I don't know what else to suggest. This took me a long time to do myself. I think it was about two years of trying GTD before I finally got a list of contexts that I was satisfied with for more than a month at a time (my current context list has remained almost unchanged except for occasional additions as I've taken on new responsibilities for about a year). It's one of the hardest parts of setting up your next action list and I think most problems people have with their next action list can be remedied with rethinking their contexts (at least that's what I've found for myself).

I would suggest really examining where and when you assign high or low priorities in your task list and then ask yourself, "Is this really just another context?"
 
Could set your contexts up as, for example:

@Home - High
@Home - Medium
@Home - Low

Or am I missing something here?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by strongmace View Post
Could set your contexts up as, for example:

@Home - High
@Home - Medium
@Home - Low

Or am I missing something here?
Not quite what I meant. Let's say I examine all of my high priority tasks and discover that most of them are related to a certain kind of work. Well, then I've found a subcontext of @Work. I can stop using the priority for that and just use the subcontext instead to narrow down my task list when I'm working on those kinds of projects.

A personal example that won't apply to everyone: I'm studying industrial design right now and I have a context set up called @Campus. When I'm on campus, this is the list of things I need to be concerned with. This list started to get really large and unwieldy so I took a good look at it and realized that a large number of those tasks all had one thing in common, I needed to be in a lab or shop of some kind to complete them. So I created a sub-context called @Campus:labtime where I put all of those tasks.

I have, in my calendar, the lab schedule for department so I know when the wood shop is open or when I can get in a welding booth. When I'm on campus during those times, I look at the "labtime" list rather than the campus list.

It's possible, that when looking at your high and low priority tasks, you'll discover that the high priority tasks have something in common with each other beyond just priority. That something is your new context.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by MEP View Post
If you have a really long list of tasks in a single project, that really sounds like it could be broken down into smaller sub-projects.
My problem is that, in my line of work, I can have many dozen available projects at a given moment. (They're all small, but can be put on hold, prioritized, etc.)

Even when I'm in a specific context, I may still have many dozen next actions available. (Some of the projects won't appear because their next tasks aren't in the current context.) And it's the long list of available actions in my context that I need to, once or twice a day, review top to bottom to prioritize them.

Your point about getting into a bad habit of not looking at the end of a prioritized list is well-taken. But I can't really afford the overhead of going throught a LONG list (that really can't be whittled down) after every action.

I realize my situation may be a little unusual, having this many active tasks in a current context. In fact, many of the tasks will never get completed, simply because there isn't time -- but I still need to record them when they're first proposed so that I can consciously not do them if other, more important tasks displace them.

Quote:
If the list is still too large I think you need to rework your contexts to make it smaller -- which kind of sounds like a cop out, but I don't know what else to suggest.
How about priorities? :) I do appreciate the value of this approach, but unfortunately, it doesn't work in all cases -- sometimes you simply can't reduce the list of tasks, but you can prioritize them with varying levels of permanence.

And I really do need the lists to be this long, so that I have a single place to look for tasks and projects, other than in my head. Ah, the joys of having all possible irons in the fire simultaneously.

Quote:
I would suggest really examining where and when you assign high or low priorities in your task list and then ask yourself, "Is this really just another context?"
The examples you gave of subdividing like this all had to do with situational or geographical contexts, which is indeed how I use contexts. The only way I could subdivide further is to mix the notion of context with priority (as strongmace suggested), which I'd really rather not do.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by pjc View Post
The examples you gave of subdividing like this all had to do with situational or geographical contexts, which is indeed how I use contexts. The only way I could subdivide further is to mix the notion of context with priority (as strongmace suggested), which I'd really rather not do.
My examples were not the best and that's because I haven't used priority in years, so I can't really remember the last time I dumped a priority in favor of a context. If priority works for you right now, then use it.

I'm really only saying that when I finally ditched priority completely, it made a huge impact on the overall effectiveness of my entire GTD system. And I had similar problems letting go of priority because I couldn't figure out how to change my contexts to eliminate its necessity -- I hadn't really analyzed why I was assigning certain priorities and found the underlying semantic connections that allowed me to tune my contexts. I personally think that anyone's task list can be contextualized in such a way as to eliminate the need for priority altogether, but I also know it took me a long time (years) to accomplish that and there's no way my contexts will work for you.
 
Quote:
As I look through a long list of avaiable task
There is your GTD problem, the lists are too long.

DA doesn't talk about it (or I missed it) but a good trick to GTD is keeping your lists short enough to scan through them pretty quickly. Since the human mind can only handle 8 items, I like to keep my lists in any one context (where you should be scanning) down under 20. If they get bigger than 20, create more specifc contexts.

With a list under 20 you should be able to quickly scan that context and pull priority by looking at the list.

Again, the point is prioritizing things in the future is pretty much a waste of time as it changes too much to put a system to handle it and your brain is much more adept as figuring out priority based on time/energy and current situation.

Just my $5

BZ
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by BwanaZulia View Post
There is your GTD problem, the lists are too long...If they get bigger than 20, create more specifc contexts.
I agree that having short lists is an excellent aspect of GTD, however it doesn't work in all circumstances. In an environment where tasks are coming in rapid-fire, I would have to spend a lot of effort coming up with artificial context designations to get the list this short.

Fortunately, I don't feel bad about accomplishing only a few tasks on an extremely large list -- not everything is possible to get done. But I still need to record the full list, at full speed.

Quote:
Again, the point is prioritizing things in the future is pretty much a waste of time...
Agreed. I just need some way to pass through the list on a daily basis to figure out which few tasks I'm going to try to complete. If I finish them all, I can move on to others.

It occurred to me this afternoon that I can actually use flagging for my needs. I can pass through the list in the morning and flag the tasks that look like they're the most pressing for the day (and unflag the ones that no longer seem important). Then I can sort by flag status until I'm done with flagged items.

So now I'm back in the priority-neutral camp. :)
 
 


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