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How to deal with energy level & priority Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
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:
Originally Posted by abh19 View Post
2) In the mean time, what are some ideas for shoehorning these last two criteria into my OmniFocus GTD system?
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?
 
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 .
 
imho priorities should be intuitive once "stuff" has been correctly channeled through gtd. Looking for low energy or low priority tasks to much would undermine the bottom up principle, no? I know what you're looking for but for me it would mean that i haven't been able to achive the "mind like water" state. I think that once gtd works it shouldn't be daunting to look at to do lists or fearing "higher effort" actions on a huge list. Perhaps the level on energy at that state is so low that nothing should be "done". there is a filtering option that you look for in another gtd app (Things) - but i have to say it didn't work for me with that filtering - i realised that i messed up the gtd method along the way...
 
Just to recap my position. Priority and energy are just too in flux to capture in a program and are better suited to your current state and mind.

Priority: If you tried to capture priority on every task, project, context it would become a very complex system. If you changed the priority of one task or priority, how would that effect the other projects and tasks. If your lists are small (under 20) priority can be determined in seconds by a quick glance, much faster than capturing, plus the priority of any of those tasks could change in a second.

Energy: Energy is another amorphious thing. On Friday afternoon you might think that sending that email to your boss is a high energy task because you have low energy, but on Monday morning when you actually talked to your boss via phone or have the answer from someone else, that task is now a quick reply and low energy. In fact, if you were looking at the Low Energy list in the morning before coffee, it woudn't be there.

Again, I am not saying that energy and priority aren't important, they are, but the actual capture and manipulation of those fields is way too time consuming to make them useful for a good GTD system.

BZ
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by BwanaZulia View Post
Priority: If you tried to capture priority on every task, project, context it would become a very complex system. If you changed the priority of one task or priority, how would that effect the other projects and tasks. If your lists are small (under 20) priority can be determined in seconds by a quick glance, much faster than capturing, plus the priority of any of those tasks could change in a second.
And how many of us have small lists of items? Under twenty? Show of hands? Clearly, having a priority is important for those of us who have large lists of tasks, so we can narrow it down to the top 20 or so that we want to look at right now. And again, priority does not need to be a complex system. You lower the priority of one project or task, and it goes down on the list. What is difficult to understand about that? Make the priorities relative to parent projects or folders, and you have a detailed priority system with very little work involved to maintain it. And for people who don’t care about priority, you could just ignore the new system and everything would be the same as it is now. I still don’t understand why you are so opposed to this.
 
 


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