Thanks for doing this, Nick. Your experience mirrors mine exactly with MLO. MLO has consistently frustrated my attempts to order tasks precisely WHICH IS WHAT I WANT (Sorry to use capital here but no attempts to persuade me otherwise is going to succeed - for the reasons that you have succinctly outlined in previous posts).
And as you indicate, Nick, I suspect there is a significant number of people for whom this is a must have. What nobody can easily know (Andrey included) is the proportion of people who look at/try out MLO and think "Hmmm - interesting but I can't easily order tasks in an order that makes sense to me" and move on (unless Andrey is doing any sort of abandonment survey of those who download but then don't sign up). There is a real risk of just listening to your existing customers that you end up with a product that meets their needs really well but which does not have a broader appeal (Aside: EverNote is an interesting example of this - they had an interesting product which successful met the needs of fairly specialist audience; they made some major changes in Version 3 which actually simplified it considerably and, it seems, massively broadened its appeal. I was actually one of the people in the specialist audience who was very happy with Version 2 and so for me Version 3 was a disaster, but I can understand why they did it. What was interesting was that when the launched Version 3, most of the posts in the forum were hostile to the new version. We had all been posting making suggestions for making the product more sophisticated and complicated and so were really shocked when the EverNote reversed direction completely and went for a much more simplified product with a broader appeal. Do wish that Andrey would make some sort of statement of intent on manual ordering (there were a couple of postings which indicated that he was looking at something). It feels to me that he has recently delivered a round of major enhancements that a lot of people wanted to see but it is not clear to me now where he is going next with the product. My guess would be that there is a significant audience out there for a 'simplified' version of EverNote which just allows people to manually order their tasks (as you suggest, Nick) but unfortunately this forum isn't the place to ask as there are just a few of us from the 'manual ordering' faction for whom MLO offers enough that we stick around with everybody else being quite happy with the original scoring based approach. Richard > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] > [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of metroboy > Sent: 14 March 2009 11:18 a > To: MyLifeOrganized > Subject: [MLO] Re: Prioritizing Items ToDo Today - Suggestions Wanted > > > > Steve, > > I've replaced Weekly Goals with an "@_Today" context for > flagging items to go onto my "Today" list. I've normalized > all the Importance and Urgency settings and...unfortunately > using the Urgency slider doesn't really work. I am getting a > very similar behavior to what I was previously: moving a task > up or down with the slider is *very* jerky. In some places > it advances task-by-task (which is the behavior I want) -- > and in some places it advances over 5 or 6 other tasks in one > jump, and I can't place it in the middle of that task clump, > no matter how hard I try. > > It's really crazy not to be able to directly drag-and-drop > tasks to a particular spot in the to-do list! I seriously > think there needs to be *three* settings in the To-Do > Ordering Behavior dialog: Hierarchical Score, Computerized > Priority, and a new one: "Manual Ordering". The task order > achieved as a result of choosing "Manual" should be > persistent between sessions, so that I can come back to the > same order that I set up previously. > > My observation from watching the past few years of MLO's > development is that a lot of work was put into rationalizing > the Computed Score Priority. This was partially motivated > based on MLO's background as a competitor to Life Balance, > which was one of the first to-do programs to automatically > rank tasks in a "suggested" order. I think it's time to > gently move this part of MLO's DNA into the background. > Life Balance is no longer the dominant player in Task/To-Do > programs, and people come to MLO from a lot of different > directions. I understand that a lot of people are using the > Computed Score Priority ranking in their daily work, and that > option should certainly be left in place for them. But I bet > there are a lot of people who would like something different, > and I'm definitely one of them. > > Nick > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/myLifeOrganized?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
