Hi Dwight
Thanks.
For now I am allocating my coarse/absolute priority by popup on the
Importance field and I am then manually sorting them twice
1. I sort them manually into the 7 different values of importance. Although
this is a slight pain because this can be done visually and only really
applies to new tasks, it is fairly quick to do this manual/visual sort,
once the bulk have already been sorted previously.
2. I then go through them more carefully, re-evaluating the priority of
each task relative to each other.
Because I am only doing this to my Starred tasks there aren't all that many
tasks to process at any one time.
Out of interest did you ever find a way to change the Importance by small
(i.e. 0-200) increments using just the keyboard?
Thanks
J
On Friday, January 26, 2018 at 4:48:42 PM UTC, Dwight wrote:
>
> 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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