@Eric&Joseph: Well, in the gtd book David mentions several times that
trying to get/store priorities in your gtd system is a waste of effort.
Suppose that you're somewhere and you have free time and you want to
pick a next action to do. In that case you should be able to filter all
your next actions by selecting the context you're in and optionally by
specifying tags/projects too.
David mentions specifically several times in his book that you should
then just look at the list and trust your own judgment in picking the
task that is "the right task to do".
Note that in the whole process, the concept of priorities is never
entered into the system specifically, unlike many traditional
approaches. You look at the list and you decide.
No need to enter priorities first and then pick the one with the highest
prio or whatever. If you follow gtd you just _know_ you've made the
right choice
Sure, the list can get long and resorting to some priorities system will
give you a way to not have to look to all of your next actions. (You can
scan the high prio ones and don't look at the low prio ones).
But why would that be a better system? Most of the 'high prio' things
are only high prio because they need to happen before a specific date.
in that case they belong in the tickler.
Others are "high prio" because they are in a project that you want
to/must finish. Well then.. put them in the project and focus on the
project if you want to do the project.
The other 'high prio' things are just things 'you would prefer to do as
soon as possible', does that make the other next actions not work
looking at? Any of them can become more important due to circumstances,
so imho you should have the full list available.
(In fact, the principle of 'constantly changing priorities' is one of
the reasons gtd is designed the way it is designed)
I think you can get away of using a priorities system by making good use
of projects and tags. (even though a priorities system may look like
something useful on first sight)
Unless I'm missing something here. Feel free to correct me.
@Joseph: 'deferring to someday/maybe'? Sorry but that's really not gtd.
'Someday/Maybe' is about things you don't plan to do. (they are not
actions!) You might do them sometime in the future, so you just dump
them there and review the list every once in a while so you don't forget
about them. You could convert them into next actions someday.
If you feel like you need to do something like this, it seems to me like
you made a mistake of putting this as a 'next action' in your next
actions list, because apparently you have "next actions" that just are
not next actions, but things you might do someday.
If you have next actions that you just "don't want to think about for a
couple of days", they probably belong in one or more projects/tags, and
then just don't look at those projects/tags if you don't want to do
them. (this is where the "you can trust your own choice" part comes in)
Bottomline is: GTD can work great, but it's a concept as a whole. if you
mis-implement one or more patterns the whole thing collapses down in an
unproductive mess. The tricky part is that some of those "bad patterns"
might make sense if done as only
task management system, or as part of some other task management system,
but _not_ in gtd.
Bottomline 2: We need a better way to filter the 'next actions' list,
by enabling/disabling the view of one or more projects,contexts,tags and
see the updated view in realtime.
Dieter
Joseph Method wrote:
I like/use them. There are things that I don't want to think about for
a couple of days. I actually wanted (or thought I wanted) a defer to
someday option, but I liked the +5 once I started using it. But it
also seems reasonable to defer to someday/maybe; it's not deferring
then, it's re-prioritizing.
On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 6:35 PM, Eric Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It is definitely just moving actions to the tickler. I didn't realize how
un-GTD my approach was until you brought it up. I guess my workflow has some
optimization opportunity! That being the case, are the defer buttons a good
idea or should I revert them?
On Oct 5, 2008, at 1:23 PM, Dieter Plaetinck wrote:
Ok, I just realised your 're-deferring' approach is probably moving actions
to the tickler. (and not to someday/maybe, phew ;-)
But still my points remain. One should not re-defer because he doesn't want
to do the action right now, one should only defer to the tickler if he is
100% sure he only needs/wants to do the action at that specific time. (or
later)
Otherwise you're moving actions around too much.
Dieter
Dieter Plaetinck wrote:
Eric Allen wrote:
Yeah, we are definitely starting to suffer from clutter in the
interface. I personally like packing as much as possible in, but I
suspect I'm in the minority. I'd like to avoid too much
customizability in the interface because then we become just another
SAP or something with wayy too many features.
Right now my biggest cognitive cost on the interface is evaluating
which tasks I can actually execute right now. That's my primary
motivation for the defer buttons: get stuff off the screen so I can
focus on what I can actually do.
This is imho not efficient - and not the way gtd recommends it, iirc.
Too see what actions you can do at a given moment, you should be able to
filter your list of next actions by specifying (a combination of) one or
more contexts / projects / tags.
That's it.
(The tracks interface currently doesn't really allow this right now though.
For more information see the 'menu reorganizing' mails. )
It has been a while since I read the book, but iirc all your next actions
are essentially deferred, because you couldn't do them right away when you
thought of them or when you processed your inbox. (2-minute rule)
So if you're re-deferring tasks frequently just to get them out of your
sight (and you need to do this again when they show up again, or you need to
look them up again when you changed context), are you as effective as you
could be?
How do you 're-defer' a next-action anyway? Because in essence all
next-actions are already deferred. Aren't you talking about the
'Someday/Maybe' bucket? (That's conceptually very different then
deferring. It's about placing things you don't plan to do. You might do
them sometime in the future, so you just review the list every once in a
while so you don't forget about them but they are not in your way either)
Dieter
Next on my list is task dependencies,
so you can have only the top task from a project showing, for example.
I wonder if using alternating colors on the tasks or something else to
separate them visually would help.
On Oct 4, 2008, at 1:52 PM, Luis Villa wrote:
On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Eric Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Yeah, I pushed that to trunk before I came up with good
documentation. Those
are defer buttons that will push the show_from date out by 1 and 7
days
respectively. Would "Defer x days" be a descriptive enough alt text?
Yup, that would definitely be an improvement. Ideally if the UI has
that information it shouldn't need to be documented at all (no one
reads the docs anyway ;)
Note that generally I think each task line is really cluttered right
now- at this point every line in the table now has *9* pieces of
information associated with it:
[delete]
[edit]
[star]
[complete]
[overdue?]
[title]
[project]
[defer 1 day]
[defer 7 days]
Multiply that by a lot of tasks and that's a whole lot of information
in every screen. Having your eyes scan that much information every
time makes it harder to find the really important information- 'what
do I need to do next.'
I'm afraid I don't have any great suggestions on how to simplify right
now- maybe put the less frequently used star/delete/defer buttons into
the edit box? But I'd definitely strongly recommend considering the
cognitive cost of all this clutter before adding anything more.
Thanks again to everyone- trunk looks great, and I'm looking forward
to playing with calendar and the email code-
Luis
On Oct 4, 2008, at 1:14 PM, Luis Villa wrote:
Like I said in the other question, I just upgraded to latest master.
There are now [+1][+7] buttons next to every action, but they've got
no alt text so I have no idea what they do :) They also don't seem
to
work consistently- I clicked it on one overdue action and it sent it
to the tickler, and clicked on another and (AFAICT) it changed the
due
date instead.
Can someone explain? :)
Luis
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