How can I create a view showing my Projects sorted by JUST project-level Importance + Urgency ?

[John Smith]

Hi

I want to create a view that shows my Projects sorted with the most Important and most Urgent projects at the top of the page.
I want both Importance and Urgency to be equally weighted, however I do not want Due Date, Start Date, nor Weekly Goal to be used at all.
And for ease of management of Project level Importance and Urgency fields, I do not the importance of sub-tasks/Actions to be to be used at all either.

I have tried using CSP ('Computed Score Priority') and  Tools > Options > 'To-Do Ordering options' and dragging all the sliders to the left (see screenshot) but I am still getting unexpected results.
i.e. The results that I am getting do not seem to reflect just the Project-level Importance + Urgency.

I think I read somewhere that CSP automatically uses task-level Importance and Urgency in determining overally Project-level CSP.

Is there any way to create a view that lists my Projects that is sorted just by Project-level Importance + Urgency in an equally weighted manner?

Many thanx

J

[Dwight Arthur]

Hi, John. The only function in MLO that I can think of that deals with the sum of importance and urgency is Computed-Score. As you have discovered, there are numerous other factors involved in Computed-Score, and if someone who cannot mentally grasp it all (such as myself) tries to use it the results can be unexpected. There is a definitive writeup on Computed-Score in the Users Guide. It seems to be quite helpful for anyone who is committed enough to Computedf-Score to actually invest the time necessary to understand it.

However, sorting by either importance *OR* urgency is quite simple. If you have some views dominated by importance, others by urgency and others by some combination of the two, I have no advice. Otherwise, I would suggest that you combine your task's importance and urgency in your own head to select a number representing overall priority of the task, and enter it into either importance or urgency (I use importance) and then sort by that field.

-Dwight

[John Smith]

Dwight - thanks.

Imho, this is a DEEP flaw in MLO's entire system.

The Computed Score needs to be fully understandable and to produce fully controllable results or it is utterly useless (which tragically seems to be the case here). I read the help instructions and am none the wiser. And to be frank if someone with the guru status of you Dwight does not find the Computed Score intelligible then what hope is there for 99.5% of MLO users?  

The fact is that Importance and Urgency are utterly different concepts. It's like conflating two different database fields like, say Surname with Age - it simply makes no sense!

For a start Urgency is likely to change rapidly and is more likely to apply to tasks (in my experience)... whereas Importance is less likely to change and is more likely to apply to Projects.

I think it's absolutely crucial to one's overall effectiveness to NOT to conflate the two concepts, otherwise you will stay very busy... but loose sight of what actually matters. i.e. You are very likely to become deeply ineffective.

[ If you still need convincing then checkout the book I am reading: Greg McKeown's Essentialism (as recommended by Michael Hyatt – (productivity guru – he of 250K twitt followers) who said "it is the best book I've read in the last 5 years" http://michaelhyatt.com/essentialism.html ) ]

Back to MLO. 

Is there genuinely no way to combine fields arithmetically in order to do sorting? e.g. Might one for example use MLO's effort field + importance in some cunning way.

J

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