Thoughts on a "Bubble" Sort" style tool to help with setting importance / urgency?

[Rob Feeny]

Ok this one has been bouncing around in my head for a while.  To be honest, I'm terrible at time management.  I have a lot of trouble deciding what is more important or urgent and seeing as GTD etc are tools to "dumb down" your to-do list and let you focus on Next Actions, rather that the whole picture, I had an idea for a feature to do the same for priorities of tasks, as I get caught up in "Paralysis by Analysis" when trying to decide what is more important.

This is a bit pie in the sky but maybe a neat feature for future versions.  I'd love to be able to select various tasks / projects in the outline view and tweak their importance/urgency score with a simple popup that would randomly show me 2 of the selected items and force to to choose which of the two was more important.  When faced with only 2 options, it's easy to decide what's more important.  When looking at 8 possible actions, not so easy.  If I spent one minute looking at 20 different "battles" and picking the priority, it becomes way easier to compute relative "importance" scores and eliminates the need to try to arbitrarily set the importance of a task.  Working your way down a tree would give clearer and clearer information on what is most important.

Imagine being able to click a "Help me rank my actions" button and it first shows you top level options (First level parents) and you spend one minute refining their importance/urgency scores (Choosing "A is a lot more important(urgent) than B" vs "A is a bit more important(urgent than B" vs "Skip" and the opposites "A<<B", "A<B". Then it would show you match-ups from one level down and working your way down the tree.  Spending 5 minutes every few days or once a week would ensure your scoring is still accurate and not out of date, and probably give you more realistic scores, eliminating subconscious bias in your scores set by slider.

It's just a thought, but would be a neat little tool.  What do you folks think?

[pottster]

Very interesting Rob. Slight concern that it sounds like too much fun and might be another excuse to delay doing anything off the task list! For me, I would use this as a way to choose the top three tasks and/or drop unimportant tasks rather than achieve an absolute sort or sequence. I know a bubble sort type approach has been used in things like psychometric tests as a way of overcoming confirmation bias and it could be that, as part of a weekly review, this activity could challenge the important/urgent assumptions within the task list. My problem with the whole urgent/important thing is that I've rarely found it to be static i.e. what's urgent today might not be urgent tomorrow, what's important today might not be important tomorrow.

In a similar vein, an "I feel lucky" option to have MLO randomly allocate the next task to overcome procrastination, and deliberately avoidance of certain tasks, could be useful. Sometimes it's nice to be told what to do and not have to think about it too much.

[Steve Kunkel]

Yea, it does sound like an interesting idea.  Another  similar thing that might be simpler to write code for...   When in "help me rank mode" just start clicking the different tasks one at a time, starting from most urgent to least urgent.  MLO could adjust the urgency accordingly (?)  I'm not sure that this feature would be compatible with the "machine ranking" that MLO does...  You'd have to use one or the other.