View showing Next Action with Project, sorted by Comp Score ... SUCCESS !

[John Smith]

Hi 

I rather chuffed with this.

My other threads got confused, so let's start this again

BACKGROUND RE-CAP:

I am been trying to implement GTD on MLO. And because David Allen suggests that we have (in practice) quite so many 'Projects' and because in GTD method you need to create a Next Action for every one of your Projects, due to the large number of Next Actions (often between 60 and 120 at once) that you are likely to have running in parallel... due to these large numbers at once, choosing what to do next - i.e. establishing priority of actions - becomes hard. 

Yes, Weekly Reviews are crucial. Yes Daily Reviews are crucial (plus quick scans more than once a day if possible). And yes, using Context to tell you what you can do next 'right now'' is also a helpful way to cut down the number of Next Actions you are likely to be faced with at once.

HOWEVER, with such a large number of Next Actions any way you do it, you need to be 'on top of' a LOT of Projects at once, and I find it extremely easy to find myself NOT doing the things that my brain has told me several times are rather more Important and/or Urgent, than just ticking off easy stuff off that happens to be in front of me.  

To put this more strongly, with what I had until today it was far too easy to miss important/urgent (i.e. high priority) stuff, which can easily be a total disaster!

Secondly I also get frustrated if the importance and urgency is held only at the Action level, because every time you tick off a Next Action, you are liable find you need to enter that Importance & Urgency all over again. And when up against the clock this simply may not happen! The truth for me at least, is that mostly it's the priority of completing Project itself that I need to keep on top of, rather than that of individual actions.

THE MISSION:
For the above reasons I wanted to be able to create a single view that showed:

a) The one 'Next Action' for each live project

b) To show me & allow me to edit the Importance & Urgency of the project to which each action belongs

c) To not show the folders (as they get in the way)

d) To also sort the entire view into priority order using Importance + Urgency of the Projects, so that the higher priority items are visible at the top of the page.

f) To be able to *adjust* the Importance and Urgency in real time on the same screen and thereby change the sort order in real time. This means that the priorities can then to be to some extent as relative priorities (i.e. what is more high  or low priority compared to what else) as well as being absolute values.

THE SOLUTION

After a several false starts and help from several directions (notably from Dwight and pottster) I think I this newbie here, may have cracked the problem. So I created a new View from scratch and I then did the following filter settings:
Filter > General > "Show Actions: Next Actions"
Filter > General > "Show Hierarchy: Yes"
Filter > General > Include Parents - ticked
Filter > General > Set parent filter to: "IsProject"

Filter > Group & Sort > Advanced un-ticked
Filter > Group & Sort > Group by > (none)
Filter > Group & Sort > Sort > Computed-Score [descending]

I then opened up the columns for Importance and for Urgency (plus Context for good measure) and save the view.

After all this sweat it is now semi-miraculous to see it working!

- A bonus is that you can hit F6 to just see all the projects, nicely sorted by a fusion (mostly) of Importance and Urgency. And F7 of course brings back all the Next Actions.

- Another surprise is that it doesn't blow up with multi-level projects. When you hit F7 the project structure, complete with Next Actions appears all nicely indented. 

- Another bonus I discovered is that you can 'force' the addition of individual Actions into view if required, simply by ticking the Project button on the additional Action you want. 

- A nice surprise (to me) is that if you double click on an action, you are taken to the main Outline view to see all the other sibling Actions for the project... and double clicking again takes me back again. (Obviously you need to set up the new Workspace (i.e. tab) to sync selections for this to work. [clue right-click on tab name].

- What is also great is that the Importance and Urgency columns automatically change their visual 'markup' (ie. colour/boldness) depending on their value. This make the thing more visual, with bright bold red for the supplier important/urgent stuff etc.

- I also like being able to do Alt/H to flag stuff up visually that is dead urgent too (in my case making that text go onto a bright yellow background).

- But the best fun of all is twiddling with the Imporance and Urgency of a project and seeing the project instantly fly up and down my list of priorities depending on what values I put in.  

BRILLIANT !   :^))

No doubt something will go wrong or like a fool I will decide I need something different, but for now I'm basking in glory and am firmly chalking this up as a "rare victory" over technology !

Thanks chaps  

J

[John Smith]

I spoke too soon. Drat !!! There is a problem.

Because the View is based on an Actions's Project's 'priority' (i.e Urgency & Importance), it doesn't know what to do with Actions with no parent (Projects) !  No does it know what to do with Projects with no Actions. And both disappear from view.  :^(

So there needs to be in IF in the logic. i.e. If an Action hasn't got a Project, then use its own 'priority'. And if a Project hasnt got a live Action still show itself.

Any suggestions? (other than give up trying to use Project priority...)
 
J

[Dwight Arthur]

First off, congratulations.

 

Secondly, I was getting all ready to write you a treatise on computed-score, which seemed to have been inoperative for you, but now it seems to be working. Could you share what changed to make computed-score work for you?

 

Third, the reason that empty projects are not showing is your parent filter. I’m not really sure why it works this way, my guess is that the empty projects cannot get through the filter on account of not having a parent. Unlike the next action tasks under the non-empty projects, each of which obviously has a parent. Anyhow, eliminating the parent filter brings back the empty projects and also any unattached tasks that may be floating about at the root, but also brings back folders. I can’t determine any way to drop the folders out of the view while keeping empty projects and orphan tasks. Maybe you can find some other way, like giving all of the folders a low importance to drive them to the bottom of the view.

 

Finally, not that I will ever use it, but turning a single task into a subproject as a way to force it to be a next action seems to be a brilliant hack.

 

And even more finally, you made several references to using the program in anger. I had no clue as to the meaning of the phrase and I asked on another forum and just got some other puzzled responses. It seemed to indicate that you were just an unusually hostile person, and proud of it. Then I found a post somewhere saying that it’s the opposite of “for show”, perhaps similar to the concept “in real life”. Hmmm…

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[John Smith]

> Third, the reason that empty projects are not showing is your parent filter. 

Not so fast. If I remove the parent filter the sort orders melt down. I think they are in effect applied at the end to the highest light level of thing, which instead of being Project now becomes er... folder. ==> The priority of the folder. Not good.

Sorry for confusion - "used in anger" is a Britishism for "used for real/intended purpose rather than in tests". Odd, I concede but there you go.

On the other hand we Brits never entirely get the nuances of Americanisms like "kiss my ass"...

Btw, at the risk of changing subject yet again is there any documentation in existence that explains how those rules and sub-rules are supposed to work - let alone exactly what the each of the properties actually mean? 

I seem to be bumping against the limits of the MLO system and its woeful documentation.   :^/

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[Dwight Arthur]

My conclusion is that my treatise on computed-score may still be necessary. Will attempt to get it out in the next 24h
-Dwight
Mlo betazoid on Android sgn2

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[Dwight Arthur]

First we need to discuss how sorting works in a hierarchical view. Then we can discuss computed score.

Until the current version, MLO allowed hierarchy -or- sorting but no view had both. In MLO v4 we got the ability to sort a hierarchical view. It's a relatively new concept and may not yet be fully mature or debugged.

When you create a sorted hierarchical view, it's composed in three steps:

1. Apply the filter to determine which items will be included in the view. Set them up as a flat list

2. Sort the flat list according to the sort specs for the view

3. attach the parent and/or child hierarchies as specified. This doesn't change the order of the original flat list except that any item that appears in a hierarchy under some other item can't appear separately in the list.

In the "all tasks" view the flat list from step 2 would be the list of items at the root. As a result, if you change the sort specs for "all tasks" it changes the order of the root level items but everything below the root is unaffected.

In the "next actions" view you have been working on, the flat list that gets sorted is *not* (with one exception) the list of projects. It's the list of next actions. The exception is that for a project with no active subtasks, the project itself is the next action. 

So if you turn off the hierarchy and just make a flat list of next actions, the list should show the next action from each project that has active subtasks, the name of each project that has no active subtasks, the next action from among the active subtasks of each folder, all active actions at the root, and for any task that has active subtasks, the next action among them. Try it and check if this isn't what you get.

Then you can turn on the parent hierarchy (no parent filter). For every item that's at the root this should add the project or other parent, together with any other higher hierarchy. Try it and see.

You should also be able to turn off the parent hierarchy and set any arbitrary sort sequence, and see the tasks from your flat list, line themselves up according to the sort spec. And then turn parent hierarchy back on and notice that the tasks haven't moved.

And that brings us to the most important part: YOU NEED TO SORT THE LIST OF NEXT ACTIONS IN ORDER OF THE PRIORITY OF EACH ACTION's PARENT PROJECT. That's a little weird, as usually when you sort a list it's according to the characteristics of the members of the list. In this case it's according to the characteristics of parents of the list members, and the parents are not even present (for the most part) in the list being sorted. If you look at the list of sort criteria there's no "parent project priority" or anything like it. The only thing that comes anywhere close is computed-score.

Which brings us to the discussion of computed-score. First, this disclaimer. I don't like computed-score and I don't use computed-score. I find it too hard to understand what it's doing, and too hard to make it do what I want. My reason for using any task manager is to use less of my mental capacity thinking about my tasks and more of it getting them done. With computed-score a big part of my mental capacity goes to endlessly tweaking the computed-score. However, if you want to sort a list of actions into the order of their parent projects' priority it is your only choice.

Computed-score tries to show each action's priority as an absolute number across everything in the database. For the purposes of computed-score the "importance" and "urgency" in of the action are not absolute numbers, but rather show the relative importance and urgency of this task towards accomplishment of the task's immediate parent. And the parent's importance and urgency show the parent's priority towards accomplishment of the grandparent. So the computed-score of each action shows the cumulative effect of the importance and urgency of every item in the hierarchy all the way back to the root. And it's not just importance and urgency, you can include calculations based on how close is the start date and the due date. You can give extra points if the action is overdue. You can give more points if it's a weekly goal. 

The objective is to sort the list by priority of the parent project. It seems to me that the best way to do that would be to ensure that every subtask has importance and urgency of 100, or normal. in Options, turn off extra points for overdue tasks, and set the weight for start date, due date and weekly goal as low as possible. Be sure to turn on "show computed score values on task statistics" so you can see what's going on.

Now you should be able to look at each of your next actions, look in the task statistics, and see the computed score reflecting its parent tree. You probably can't make any actual sense of the computed numbers, but you should be able to verify that the task with a higher priority parent gets a higher computed score. (If this does not work you will need help from someone, either user or staff, who understands computed score better then me.) - then, by setting sort criteria to computed-score you should be able to see your next-actions as well as their parents sorted into the desired sequence.

One last point, I believe that the right way to exclude folders and their subtasks from this view is what you did, selecting parent hierarchies to be displayed with a parent filter of (not(isfolder)). Unfortunately this does not work, because as soon as any parent filter is specified, all tasks at the root (ie tasks without a parent) are dropped from the view. I tried thinking of other parent filters to use to try to select for everything but folders, but it didn't matter. Any parent filter, regardless of its settings, excludes all root-level items, even including root level projects that have no subtasks. I can't imagine how this would be correct. I can see how there would be a need for a filter that would reject any item that's at the root and therefore is parentless, but that cannot be the correct outcome for every parent filter regardless of its content. This appears to me to be - can i say it - a bug. I would love to hear from anyone who can rationalize how this might not be a bug. Even better would be anyone who could offer a way to exclude root-level folders without also excluding root-level actions and root-level projects with no active subtasks. If nobody shows up in a couple of weeks to respond to this challenge, then I will presume that this is a bug and report it as such.

-Dwight

[John Smith]

Wow. Got it (I think).

What would be nice much easier all round would if there was a tickbox on an item saying "inherit Importance from Parent" and another saying "inhert Urgency from Parent". And that way life would be very much easier all round (!) Given that there is exactly such a thing for "Inherit parent dates" this would seem to be a very reasonable request, which if Importance and Urgency are to be used "in anger" (by which I mean "seriously" - sorry in joke) then a lot of people might find this useful.

In fact, given the choice, personally I would much prefer MLO develop these features rather than rather than fix your "bug".  

I'm not sure what the UI would look like... If short of space this could possibly be done using a tiny tick box with mouse over text that explains what it does. Something like this ?

That way if you wanted to over-ride the parent giving priority you could simply un-tick the tick-box(es) as required.

Anyone with me on this?