Hi Doug, Based on past conversations. I am certain that some members of this group do use the urgency field to help them get their To-Do lists in the "right" order. But if you have a strict ordering sequence in mind, this approach may frustrate you. For example, if you want a certain task at the top of the list, you won't be able to get it there simply by using the highest urgency unless you also assign it a Weekly Goal. Even then, that task might not make it to the top because some other task might have some other attributes that position it higher on the list. If you can wait just a bit, Andrey has stated that the next beta out will allow for manual sorting of the To-Do view which will probably suit your needs better than manipulating the urgency slider.
Or, you may want to consider a paradigm shift regarding the ordering of tasks in the To-Do view. The Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology has its practioners putting "next actions" on a Context list. Then the GTD practioner chooses a task to do right now based on what he can do (context), how much time he has, how much energy he has, and his priorities. The order of the tasks on that list is not relevant. The "Do it Tomorrow" methodology by Mark Forster also states that the order of tasks on a list is not relevant because everthing on his "Will-Do" closed list will get done that day. Ordered lists are not relevant under Mark Forster's current methodology, Autofocus. You simply move through the list until you find a task that is "ready to be done". All of these methodologies have in common the idea that the user knows instinctively what task he should do next, regardless of what's on top of the To-Do list. Based on my own experience using the Franklin Covey methodology years ago, whenever I finished a task and started looking for the next task to do, I would always look at the task at the top of my list first. But before starting that task, I would then look at the rest of the task list and if I spotted a task that I thought I should do next, I would move that task to the top of my list. In other words, even though I thought I had an ordered to-do list, I really was always choosing instinctively from a number of tasks on a list, regardless of the order. Now it is quite easy to instinctively choose the next action to do when the lists are not too long. But when the lists get very long, then the user understandably wants to "order" the tasks so the truly important and/or urgent tasks are readily seen at the top of the list. Again, when Andrey releases the next beta with manual sorting, this will greatly assist those users with very long To-Do lists. An alternative approach would be to limit the number of tasks on a To- Do view. I do this by performing a Weekly Review. In my Weeky Review I hide tasks from the To-Do view that I know I will not get a chance to get to in the upcoming week. In this way, when I look at my To-Do views by Context, I rarely see a view with more than 20 tasks. If I do get more than 20 tasks in a To-Do view, then I am doing a poor job in my Weekly Review in narrowing the scope of what is possible for the next week. Again, with a limited number of tasks showing up in my lists, the order of such tasks on my list is not all that critical. Ron On Jan 7, 2:26 pm, canadug <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for all of the replies so far. Much appreciated. > > I am going to rethink the use of due dates. I was originally using > them to sort my tasks, For example, if I wanted to do some tasks > today, I'd set the due date to today, and to push others down the todo > list by choosing a date somewhere in the future. Can I assume that > people us the Urgency field to "push" tasks to the top of the list if > they don't sort items by due date? > > On Jan 7, 2:24 pm, canadug <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > Can some give me an idea of the difference between, for example, > > setting a task's goal as "week" and just setting the due date to be > > the Friday? When I set the goal, the task floats to the top of my > > ToDo list. I don't know why it does that and I'm not sure I like that > > actually. > > > In other words, is setting the goal the same as expecting it to be > > completed sometime in the current week, regardless of which day you > > set the goal (e.g. Monday vs. say Thursday). > > > Thanks!- Hide quoted text - > > - Show quoted text -
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