[snarke]

Originally Posted by Lucas

I agree. I think people have a difficult time with this idea, though.

Indeed. Perhaps because, for some of us, this idea is utterly useless.

I have more than seventy projects in OF at the moment. (Not tasks, *projects*.) I have, on occasion, added a project that was already there. In order to minimize this, projects cannot be thrown into some kind of gigantic junk drawer; they have to be sorted. I have, for example, 9 active projects and 6 projects on standby in my "Work" folder. "Work" also contains six subfolders, related to the various different kinds of work I do.

It is not possible to rearrange the projects by priority, since it is not possible to put some of the projects in my "Personal" folder above ones in "Work," but have others below.

I'm very glad that GTD works for some people. However, after spending quite a bit of time with it, I find Mr. Allen's obsession with "open loops" amusing but irrelevant. I do not waste time fretting over ideas I haven't captured, and since I do most of my work at home, and tend to have my phone and laptop with me all the time, "contexts" is helpful, but quite inadequate. I'm almost *always* in/at the contexts that have the most items in them.

There are a lot of "To Do" list programs out there. I've looked at an awful lot of them. Most of them are cute little toys, nice for people who have nicely organized brains, or maybe pleasantly simple lives. LifeBalance came fairly close, but their inability to add scripting for years left me unable to add the extra abilities I needed to make it "good enough" for my life. OmniFocus is the most powerful program I've found to date unless I would be willing to try adapting industrial team-focused project-planning software to my needs. But even OF isn't quite good enough yet.

When some mechanism for prioritizing my tasks and projects finally appears, am I going to spend all my time reprioritizing things? Of course not; how absurd. Instead, I'm going to be able to just look at the top of the list of "next tasks" in my "At my computer" context, instead of wasting time having to scan through all twenty-seven (currently) tasks showing up there, trying to decide which one is the one I should try to do next.

I can only hope Mr. Allen would be embarrassed by people who believe he has found the One True Way, and anybody who uses different tools for organizing their life must therefore be Wrong.

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by snarke

Indeed. Perhaps because, for some of us, this idea is utterly useless.

I have more than seventy projects in OF at the moment. (Not tasks, *projects*.) I have, on occasion, added a project that was already there. In order to minimize this, projects cannot be thrown into some kind of gigantic junk drawer; they have to be sorted. I have, for example, 9 active projects and 6 projects on standby in my "Work" folder. "Work" also contains six subfolders, related to the various different kinds of work I do.

It is not possible to rearrange the projects by priority, since it is not possible to put some of the projects in my "Personal" folder above ones in "Work," but have others below.

[…]

When some mechanism for prioritizing my tasks and projects finally appears, am I going to spend all my time reprioritizing things? Of course not; how absurd. Instead, I'm going to be able to just look at the top of the list of "next tasks" in my "At my computer" context, instead of wasting time having to scan through all twenty-seven (currently) tasks showing up there, trying to decide which one is the one I should try to do next.

I can only hope Mr. Allen would be embarrassed by people who believe he has found the One True Way, and anybody who uses different tools for organizing their life must therefore be Wrong.

I understand you completely. I’m not trying to say that GTD is the right way and everything else is wrong. I’m also not trying to say that if you’re in the right context the most important thing to do will magically leap out at you. Maybe it does for some people, maybe it doesn’t for others; it doesn’t particularly for me. I’m not making a claim about GTD or David Allen. When it comes to OmniFocus though, my perception is that that the order that projects were put in was intended to make a difference; in particular, it was intended to convey priority. My perception is that people are not used to order mattering and so they miss this. I know that I could be wrong. I have no idea.

Anyway, I’m sure that I have fewer than 70 active projects and I find it a lot easier to not have to look at or ignore the tasks that I’m not going to reach because of their lack of priority. I personally do that by keeping my folders of projects in rough order of importance, and during weekly reviews look for any projects that are really important to me and move those to the top of the list. The benefit for me is that, just like you point out you would like to do, I only have to look at the top of the list to find the next thing to work on, not scan through a whole bunch of stuff. My personal view is that it is more practical to be able to have important stuff at the top of the list and therefore make it easy to work than to have a very well-organized folder structure that never has a project outside of its appropriate folder.

[whpalmer4]

It is possible to have both an organized set of projects/folders and use the method Lucas described. Build your structure. During your periodic reviews, take any projects that are on the front burner and shuffle them to the top of the sidebar, both giving them higher priority in the lists and putting them out "in the cache" for faster/easier access. When they are complete or no longer on the bubble, they go back to the long-term location. This is analogous to leaving the file folders for the three projects you are working on today on your desk next to you instead of refiling and refetching them each time you turn around. You can drag a folder instead of a project if you've got a group of related items that need such a bump.

I've currently got a total of just over 600 projects and single action lists, about 200 of which are on hold, completed, or dropped. I imagine it might still work with only 70 :-)

[snarke]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

During your periodic reviews, take any projects that are on the front burner and shuffle them to the top of the sidebar, both giving them higher priority in the lists and putting them out "in the cache" for faster/easier access.

Clever. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in order to make something "high priority" and get it to the top, I'm removing it from the hierarchical structure. Either I need to complete it soon, or I need to put it back again, or let my out-of-structure high-priority stack do exactly what my regular desk does; have piles that just keep getting larger and larger. {sigh}

I think the fact that you have to have two different containers, one where they're organized by subject, and another where they're ordered by priority, and you have to move things from one to the other because OF doesn't currently allow a project to have both properties, is a very clear case for the missing functionality of an actual priority value.

Even with my current structure, I know that the time and mental effort required to decide where a new project should go is not insignificant. *Anything* boring that I have to do repeatedly is effectively impossible. I don't have periodic reviews: they're boring boring boring. I have aperiodic ones. Re-filing projects that have fallen below the "high priority" cutoff is a non-functional solution for me.

Only the fact that OF is actually incredibly streamlined lets it work for me at all, and it still teeters on the edge of being too unwieldy. I am, to be sure, in many ways an outlier user. But it seems fairly clear to me that priorities would save YOU time and effort as well.

Hopefully we'll see that functionality appear sometime soon.

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by snarke

Clever. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in order to make something "high priority" and get it to the top, I'm removing it from the hierarchical structure. Either I need to complete it soon, or I need to put it back again, or let my out-of-structure high-priority stack do exactly what my regular desk does; have piles that just keep getting larger and larger. {sigh}

Well, you could look at it as "high priority" or alternatively "what I'm working on right now". I find that it is a bit self-correcting, because after I stash too many projects there, they don't all appear on the screen at once and the off-screen ones might as well be buried in the hierarchy at that point.

I think the fact that you have to have two different containers, one where they're organized by subject, and another where they're ordered by priority, and you have to move things from one to the other because OF doesn't currently allow a project to have both properties, is a very clear case for the missing functionality of an actual priority value.

Again, you can look it that way if that fits your philosophy and setup. In my case, I've got hundreds of projects, many of them buried several levels deep, and OmniFocus is a bit sluggish to respond, so it really makes it more of a convenience issue for me. I would always be fooling around with the priority value to get stuff in the places that I want, and that is likely to mean that the "Last Changed" attribute of the action/project is getting updated which I really would not want. And the stuff I drag to the top portion of the sidebar is not necessarily the highest priority stuff on my plate, though sometimes it will be. If something is truly a high priority project, I'm likely to just focus on that project and work it out of a project mode window until it is done or it doesn't make sense to do more.

Even with my current structure, I know that the time and mental effort required to decide where a new project should go is not insignificant. *Anything* boring that I have to do repeatedly is effectively impossible. I don't have periodic reviews: they're boring boring boring. I have aperiodic ones. Re-filing projects that have fallen below the "high priority" cutoff is a non-functional solution for me.

Certainly the re-filing would be a bit easier if OF had something like the pre-OS X Finder's "Put Away" function. My projects tend to be small (which is part of why there are so many), so I really do try to just finish them when they get to be a "priority item" rather than having to put them back, and most such projects stay that way until they are complete.

I do like my incremental review setup, described elsewhere (search for "prime number review"), though I won't claim that I always get all the reviewing in that I should. Doing a higher-quality review of some stuff each day is more feasible for me than trying to review everything at once.

Only the fact that OF is actually incredibly streamlined lets it work for me at all, and it still teeters on the edge of being too unwieldy. I am, to be sure, in many ways an outlier user. But it seems fairly clear to me that priorities would save YOU time and effort as well.

And equally clear to me that it probably wouldn't :-) I've used systems with priorities in the past, and really didn't find it helpful on a consistent basis. I'll certainly play with the features when they ship, but I don't see myself as a likely long-term user.

[wilsonng]

What I like to do is is to create two major folders. One folder is called "Active". The other folder is labelled "Someday/Maybe"

Inside the Active folder, I have placed subfolders featuring an Area of Responsibility such as Health, Work, Professional Development, Personal Development, Kids, Marriage, etc. I also have this same folder setup in my Someday/Maybe folder.

Whenever I think of a new project, it is automatically placed in Someday/Maybe's folder and the status is set to "On Hold". I already have enough things in my Active folder to keep me busy.

During my weekly review, I will look at my current Active folder and see if I need to put some projects back on hold or delete it. I would then either delete it if it is no longer significant or change the status from Active to "On Hold" and move it back to Someday/Maybe. This places projects on the backburner. It's still there but my focus goes to other projects now.

I will keep some projects in the Active folder from last week. Then I'll go through my Someday/Maybe folder and look for any projects that I want to bring to the forefront. I'll drag it from Someday/Maybe into its respective Active folder and change the status from "On Hold" to Active.

I've learned to use the Big Rocks rule. Choose three to five big rocks or projects that I want to focus on for this upcoming week. Then put them into Active status, drag them to the Active folder and get to work on them. I know that if I keep my focus on these big rock projects, I can finish them. I don't necessarily like to multi-task (do a little bit of this project and a little bit of that project). I've found that if I can focus on these big rocks, I'll complete them faster. If I feast and graze on too many projects, I'll end up with little forward progress. I would rather focus on the big rock projects so that I can complete and clear them out of my OmniFocus list. If you do a little of this and a little of that, you'll still have unfinished projects and not get anything done.

[Betaride]

To have priorities for serious project management is a MUST.
I see here many different user levels of managing daily task, so that for the needs are also different. We will never find a common opinion between these groups. We are not talking about priority change because some breaks a leg. 40% of the day are anyway not to be planned ahead of time. But we also have the other 60%.
And for that part I would very much appreciate to have a clear priority column. And for all those folks that are not so particular about recourse leveling according to priorities, they just don't use it, deactivate it.
I do not think it would be that big of a sacrifice for pure GTD users.

[wilsonng]

Hmmm....... I've been grappling with this priority without much success. I've been able to do without priorities currently but am always curious at the need for priorities as reported by many folks in this thread.

I was in the GTD Virtual Study Group Google e-mail list and there was a discussion about a new book that was just released called "Master Your Workday Now!: Proven Strategies to Control Chaos, Create Outcomes, & Connect Your Work to Who You Really Are"
by Michael Linenberger.

I guess Amazon doesn't have a Kindle version yet so I guess I'll have to wait for it in the mail.

In the reviews, it purports to handle the sense of priorities that traditional GTD doesn't really handle. I think Mr. Linenberger's priority models are based more on time horizons. He has:

Critical Now - tasks that are urgent and must be completed today.

Opportunity Now - tasks that are approaching within the next one to two weeks but don't absolutely have to be done today.

Over the Horizon list - All other tasks beyond two weeks.

But I'm guessing that I do it a little differently with OmniFocus. Put the Over the Horizon list on someday/maybe or make the project/task available later in the future by setting the start date. My Critical Now tasks are flagged. My Opportunity Now tasks are all available tasks that are not flagged.

The interesting thing is that Opportunity Now (tasks that are important in the next one to two weeks) are limited to 20 tasks at most.

But that's similar to how I put everything (especially new projects/tasks) in Someday/Maybe. Then I do my weekly review and put some current active/available tasks back to Someday/Maybe. Then I look at my Someday/Maybe (projects/tasks on hold) and then active just a handful. I know that if I set too many projects/tasks as available, my context list just gets so large that I just won't look at it. But if I keep a manageable handful of available tasks in my context list, then it's easier for me to deal with.

I'm gonna look forward to reading this book when it comes in and see a different perspective on this task prioritization monster.

[dancingbrook]

Originally Posted by Ken Case

As I recently mentioned in the Tags thread, our plan all along has been to allow people to create their own columns of metadata, which they can use however they want: with generic tags, or with specific columns for priority, people, etc. (We have this capability in OmniPlan, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle.) We just didn't have time to do it for 1.0, and we won't for 1.5 (which has to focus on synchronization so it can be ready to synchronize with the iPhone).

Hopefully in 1.7.

Maybe in 1.8? ;-)

[Yotonka]

Originally Posted by Ken Case

Exiting lurk mode for a moment. I've been following this thread closely, and I'm really sympathetic to the request for separate priorities.

I'm just also trying to avoid adding yet another built-in dimension to actions (on top of project, context, flagged, next action, start and due dates, time estimate, etc.), since the more options we add the easier it is to get lost spending time thinking about the system rather than about the actions themselves. (But if you're used to setting priorities and your new system doesn't support it, then you're probably going to spend a lot of time thinking about the system...)



Oh! Would it help reduce the need for a separate priority attribute if we restored the ability to sort actions by whether they're flagged?

(Alternatively, what did you think of the prefix hack suggested above where you include the priority as part of the action's name?)

Hey there!

I think priorities would not be separately needed if there was a possibility to sort flagged actions manually, like you say.
Another approach would be to have three differently colored flags so, you would be able to mark with one color: things that must be done, with another, things that should be done and with the third, things that would be nice to do. So one could see the tasks that have to be done that day / within the week without thinking about what are the things that matter most.

kind regards