[ambi]

Originally Posted by BwanaZulia

OmniFocus can't understand your energy or priority on any given moment of the day

I don't think OF would need to understand my priority at any moment of the day. All it needs is a space where I can put in how much energy a particular action requires, and this I can know beforehand (eg, "Craft a response to my CEO's email" = high energy, while "reset my account password" = low energy.) Then, at any given moment, I can ask OF to show me those actions that I have labelled high energy or low energy.

I think this is not a bad idea and it can be fairly easily implemented -- just another flag-type field that takes an integer rather than a boolean.

[abh19]

Originally Posted by BwanaZulia

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.
BZ

I agree that priorities for next actions or projects can change. But next actions don't normally change their energy level requirements, if it is truly a next action. "Take out the garbage" requires the same amount of mental energy every time I do it. DA says to have a list of low energy tasks available, and in the current OF implementation, there is no such list built in.

I quote: "I recommend that you always keep an inventory of things that need to be done that require very little mental or creative horsepower." (GTD, p.194)

OF doesn't have to read your mental state to produce this list. When you are planning your project's next action(s), you'd simply specify that it's a low energy action (like you do with the "duration" field, only it'd probably be a checkbox or something). Then when you're low on energy, you simply select the Low Energy Perspective (context mode, active projects, filter by next actions, and sort or filter by energy level). So, OF doesn't have to read your mind at all; you record the information when you define your next action.

I believe that having to mentally assess the energy levels and priority for each action every time you scan your next actions list is not "thinking each thought once", and is inefficient, and it gets more inefficient the longer your next actions list gets. It's not a question of whether your mind can DO IT or not... it's a matter of whether that energy spent on re-analyzings of your next actions list can be spent in a more productive way.

For now, I'm going to try and put a tag at the end of my low energy actions, something like "%%", and create a perspective that searches for that tag.

[brianogilvie]

Originally Posted by Toadling

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.

Interesting--I agree that priority is nebulous. But categorizing the energy level a task requires (especially if it's a binary choice) seems less nebulous to me. "Purge outdated files" is clearly low-energy to me, whereas "Review article manuscript" is high-energy. I'd undoubtedly have edge categories. Maybe the category should be not so much energy level as "requires brain: yes or no."

[BwanaZulia]

The other principal in GTD is that capture should be easy and inviting. Sure, OG could include priority, energy level, tags, time of day, happiness factor and all the rest, but when you are adding in your tasks, that is a lot to figure out.

DA makes it pretty clear that energy and priority and not capturable items, but more internal gauges of which of items in your contextual view you should do.

OmniFocus should remain powerful, but easy. Simple, but sticking to the main concepts of GTD.

BZ

[abh19]

Originally Posted by BwanaZulia

The other principal in GTD is that capture should be easy and inviting. Sure, OG could include priority, energy level, tags, time of day, happiness factor and all the rest, but when you are adding in your tasks, that is a lot to figure out.

DA makes it pretty clear that energy and priority and not capturable items, but more internal gauges of which of items in your contextual view you should do.

OmniFocus should remain powerful, but easy. Simple, but sticking to the main concepts of GTD.

BZ

BZ,
You are right, a person's current state is not able to be captured, but the requirements of a task are, and that's the issue I'm talking about.

Also, designation of "low energy" tasks does not have to be done at capture time. It can be done during project planning or review.

As I might have mentioned earlier, DA says "I recommend that you always keep an inventory of things that need to be done that require very little mental or creative horsepower" (GTD, p. 194 in my copy). It seems to me that the application of this principle in OmniFocus would be the ability to pull up a next actions list in context mode which displays only actions requiring little mental energy. I think this is what David Allen had in mind when he made the above recommendation. If not, I welcome your ideas....

I'm certainly not saying that every action must be designated with energy level requirements, as that would add steps to the capturing process, and for the most part would be unnecessary. I only need to designate low energy tasks so I can isolate these in an actions list. Everything that is not on that low actions list is an action that requires a moderate degree of alertness or greater. Now, some might want to specify high energy as well as low energy, but I haven't gotten to that point yet.

Since I'm not using the flag for anything else, my current solution is to flag low energy tasks. I have a list of a dozen or so next actions in a "Low Energy" perspective that displays them and only them in context mode.

So, for the people who aren't using the flag for anything else, there's the solution. If they are using the flag for priority, then it looks like manually adding a text symbol tag to the action is the solution. By the way, flag states and search text are both preserved in a perspective.

The flag is preferable because it can be added to multiple entries at once, and it can be done very quickly (and can be put in the toolbar for easy access).

[yucca]

If you have your contexts setup right, it really shouldn't be necessary to set a Duration value to determine you next available action. But I do exactly that as I use a custom perspective to filter for tasks fitting my available time.

I set Duration religiously as custom time available perspectives allow me to defer further refinements to my use of contexts - refinements that I doubt would yield any significant productivity improvement.

Energy and creativity are even more "out there" from the core of a properly implemented GTD system (and priority even further out there still). I question the return on capturing and estimating "required" energy levels for tasks. I think that energy (and creativity) level requirements are more malleable than priority even. I will estimate that a task requires little energy/creativity when I'm in a highly productive mode, but my estimate of the same task will be completely different when I'm beat down at the end of the day.

Even if Omni adds another flag field to OF, some would argue that we are really "only" talking about adding another field; and they will go on to point out that there are multiple enegry levels so the field should be a two character alphanumeric since they can disntinguish between that many energy levels. Sorry for the hyperbole, but you get the point.

Then the creativity crowd would ask why they are being discriminated against. Where is their field?

Then we are back to the Franklin-Covey crowd demanding two fields for setting priority.

Where does it end? I don't know. I am fairly certain that there is a finite number of fields beyond which the interface bogs down.

Oh! And my point about the subjective nature of energy/creativity levels? The same point can be made about Duration as well. Available energy and creativity levels can drastically alter task duration in some instances.

Therefore, I am very aware that it is hypocritical of me to suggest that Duration (which is dear to me) is any more worthy of inclusion in OF than is energy level. It is very easy, perhaps too easy, for me to say: "No. Now that I have a field that I need, we shouldn't add any more fields since that would needlessly complicate matters."

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by abh19

You are right, a person's current state is not able to be captured, but the requirements of a task are, and that's the issue I'm talking about.

Also, designation of "low energy" tasks does not have to be done at capture time. It can be done during project planning or review.

As I might have mentioned earlier, DA says "I recommend that you always keep an inventory of things that need to be done that require very little mental or creative horsepower" (GTD, p. 194 in my copy). It seems to me that the application of this principle in OmniFocus would be the ability to pull up a next actions list in context mode which displays only actions requiring little mental energy. I think this is what David Allen had in mind when he made the above recommendation. If not, I welcome your ideas....

For the kind of contexts that I can or can't do when I don't have a lot of attention, I split them into normal and low-energy variants.

Originally Posted by BwanaZulia

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.
BZ

OmniFocus also can't understand what context I'm in or how much time I have. Maybe those features shouldn't be in there either.

[dominiqueg]

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...

[BwanaZulia]

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