On May 24, 2010, at 16:25, Eric Allen wrote: > Are you viscerally opposed to implementing this, or to seeing others > implement it?
Speaking as a user... I'm in favor of drag-drop (re)ordering of items. I'm vehemently against having a "priority" field with a visible value from a set of allowed values. My observation, based on years of using and building organizational software, is that a simple one-dimensional priority scale doesn't work, especially when you don't give any explicit criteria for which things belong at which priority levels. It doesn't even work with one person using it. To remind everyone, there are at least two orthogonal kinds of "priority" that apply to every task: urgency and importance. Interestingly, The Book doesn't seem to talk very explicitly about the difference between the two. It's easily explained by example, though: "Set DVR to record American Idol" is urgent, because if you don't do it by tomorrow evening, you'll miss the show. However, it's completely unimportant, because if you miss the show, your life will probably not be any worse as a result. "Get annual cholesterol screening" is important, because it could save my life, but it's not urgent, because it doesn't matter if I'm several months late doing it, so long as I do it once a year on average. "Repair corrupt filesystem on production web server" is both urgent and important, for reasons which are hopefully obvious. And finally, "Jot down ideas for the great American novel" is neither important nor urgent. So any time you try to assign a single-value global priority to a task, you're projecting at least two axes onto a single one. You can't look at only importance, or only urgency, because then you end up either not doing urgent things in time, or never getting around to important things. This is why the GTD approach, as described by David Allen, seems to be to filter tasks down to a manageable list, then evaluate the priorities *as they stand there and then*. Of course, in some narrow problem domains you can define priorities. For example, if you're talking about software defects you can define "1 = program crash with data loss", "2 = program crash without data loss", "3 = feature fails to work at all", "4 = feature doesn't work properly", "5 = wish list item". However, if you're working in a narrow problem domain, you probably want a more specialized workflow than GTD. > I created the +1 button specifically to keep track of hot tasks. Seems to me a tag would be the obvious way to track hot tasks. And of course, you could always create tags "pri1", "pri2" etc, if you think that'll work for you. mathew -- mathew [email protected] <URL:http://www.pobox.com/~meta/> _______________________________________________ Tracks-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rousette.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/tracks-discuss
