this may not be what you are looking for but it is how I handle the
situation. I do the rough sort using the importance popup for what you
call absolute priority and I call coarse tuning. Then to force an order
onto the tasks I use the full 0-200 scale of importance. If I have a
cluster at importance=120 I will reassign them values between 115 and
125 to make them come out in the right order.
My tasks list is complex and yet I never need more than 200 actually
different priority levels. If you are running out of granularity my bet
is that you are bumping up into the bell curve. For example you might
have no tasks between 25 and 75 but 100 tasks between 120 and 130. That
means that you are doing it wrong, falling into the trap of "all my
tasks are above average". Dont do that, go back and spread them more
evenly so that 100 does not mean "normal", it means "half of my tasks
are below this in priority."
To directly answer your question there is no way to make a hybrid of
automatic and manual sorting. And there is no way to turn on automatic
sorting for a manually sorted list and hope it will retain any memory of
your previous manual sort. fwiw you can take an automatically sorted
list and switch it to manual, reordering what you want to reorder and it
will remember. New tasks and changes to existing tasks will not be
automatically sorted until/unless you re-enable automatic sort, after
which your manual sort is all reset. and, one more thing, the manual
sort is only synched to mobile if you do this in the STARRED view.
-Dwight
On 1/26/2018 7:27 AM, John . Smith wrote:
Yes, using multiple fields to do the sorting is a cunning idea... but it
doesn't really help me.
What I am trying to achieve is slightly subtle.
The problem that I have found is that any form of priority that uses
"absolute" values eventually breaks down when one uses it. This is
because you end up getting lots of tasks that are of about the same
level of priority to you and for this reason, you get a sort of
"clustering effect" emerging over time with lots of task seeming to have
the same priority.
So for example, I might well end up with say 10 tasks ALL of which have
Importance=120, Flag=red, and one quickly runs out of whatever your
finest divisions are. i.e. You run out of 'granularity'...
But what I was trying to do is to prioritise my tasks in two passes.
*Pass #1. *In this pass I go over my tasks in a hierarchy view. Here I
allocate an approximate absolute priority to me. [e.g. MLO's Importance
field with 7 possible values works well for this ("Max, A Lot, More,
Normal, Less, Little, Min" )] And I allocate any Stars (which to me
means "Attempt to do in the next 2 days")
*Pass #2. *In my second pass, I am looking at a flat (non-hierarchical)
view. I am just looking at those items which I have starred. In this
pass I am trying to decide in which order to actually execute my starred
items.
So for Pass #1 my allocating of an absolute priority to me (e.g. using
the Importance field's popup) works well. ==> and *automatic sort,* in
this case based on the Importance will get tasks into roughly the right
order and works well.
However, for my Pass #2, I need to create a sequence of which tasks I am
going to do in what order. i.e. which tasks I am going to execute first.
This requires comparing the priority of tasks side-by-side/next to each
other. [Plus in some cases any possible clustering of similar tasks
together, as this may be more efficient, due to set-up times, mood,
location etc ] And this requires a *manual sort*.
To get clear, in the end users do have decide in which order they will
execute their tasks. I mean even if you have your 10 tasks with exactly
the same level of priority in the absolute sense (i.e. of how
important/urgent each of them is to you), what you then have to decide
is: In what sequence are you actually going to execute those tasks?
And that last bit will require a* manual sort *of all those tasks that
have roughly a similar priority to you.
So this is what I tried.
Having completed my careful manual sort, I tried to switch on the
automatic sort by Importance on a temporary basis, hoping that it would
only move tasks past each other if they had differing Importance values
and that task of the same Importance values would stay put.
I was then hoping to switch back to a manual sort to complete the
fine-tuning of which tasks to do in which order.
However what happens is that the automatic sort uses
1. Sort by Importance and then
2. It ignores my careful manual sort and instead sorts by the sequence
in the unsorted master outline...
And then the second that you remove the sort and turn on manual sorting
again, the sort order goes back to whatever it was before, completely
ignoring the fact that I had ever turned on the automatic sort.
TL;DR It seems that the only way to do a relative [task vs. task] sort
is to do a manual sort, but that it is impossible to get things roughly
into the right order first using an automated sort.
J
On Thursday, January 25, 2018 at 5:11:51 PM UTC, Alyona (MLO Support) wrote:
You may assign flags of different colors to differentiate tasks that
are equally important. After that set up sorting: first by
importance, then by flags.
For example, you have task 1 (importance=150, no flag), task 2
(importance=120, flag=blue) and task 3 (importance=120, flag=red).
The items in To-Do list will have the following order: Task 1, task
3, task 2.
On Thursday, January 25, 2018 at 3:28:28 PM UTC+2, John . Smith wrote:
Hello
Is it possible to have a View that is only /partly/ a manual sort?
e.g. Can I have a view that is sorted by Importance, but between
tasks of identical Importance, I can manually sort them?
To get clear, what I am trying to achieve is that I when I do a
pass over my tasks, I want to flag up the really high priority
task, and also flag up which are definitely lower priority, but
which nonetheless I intend to do during this time period (i.e.
normally today). And I want it to stay visually obvious as I
refer to and execute my tasks as to which tasks are of what
'absolute' priority... And yet at the same time, within the
rough ranges of priority I then wish to change which tasks are
of which priority /relative to each other/.
Maybe there is a better field to use other than Importance, but
it would be nice to be able to use keyboard shortcuts as much as
possible.
Thanks
J
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