How Best to Sort Tasks

[c.k. lester]

How do you guys make sure your task list is proper. IOW, I have a lot of tasks, and they're not displaying in the order I want them to on my active actions list. This is no doubt because I haven't added enough information, but what is the best way to order the tasks?

I had a bizarre occurrence when exploring my options. I took a task that was close to the top of the active actions list (it's to watch a series of educational videos) and added a start date of today and a goal date of Thursday. It moved the task to the bottom of the active actions list!! It should have remained somewhere near the top at least.

So, then I set its urgency a little higher, and then it got popped to the top.

I think I'd rather just sort everything myself, manually. If I do that in some view, how will that affect the task information? What variable does it use to maintain a manually sorted list?

So, basically, what's the best way to keep a task list sorted?

Thank you!

[Dwight]

It's a great question and I will try to restrain my answer from getting
terribly long. Five topics: Managing tasks versus managing task
managers, computed score, importance versus urgency, manual sorting,
close enough versus perfection

Managing tasks versus managing the task manager
My prime objective for my time with task managers is to spend less time
managing tasks and more time getting the tasks done. Time spent managing
the task manager comes on the wrong side of this equation, so I fight
against the temptation to spent long hours endlessly tweaking my
to-do's. I find it important to keep that in mind in this discussions
because this is one of those areas that always falls short of perfect
and you can drown yourself trying to get a little closer to perfection.

Computed score
The thing that you are fighting with is called Computed Score. This is a
wonderful thing which rolls up dates, priorities and maybe some other
stuff and rolls it all together into a single number per task that can
be used to order your to-do lists. It's the only way (in MLO) to get a
task that starts out low in the to-do list but moves towards the top as
the due date approaches. Most (or at least much) of the time it works
pretty well, and there are some settings that can be used to tweak it.
There are some areas where it is hard to handle. One involves tasks with
no due date, which never seem to be in the right place when compares to
tasks that have a due date. Another involves importance versus urgency
which is discussed below. I don't use computed score, because it
violates my prime objective - there is always some task in the wrong
place and when I tweak stuff to make it come out better something else
gets worse and it never ends. However a lot of people use computed score
and some people think it's the best feature of MLO. If you want to use
it, you might want to start by understanding it. There are a few pages
in the MLO Users Guide about computed score, with formulas and examples.
If you want to really understand it, follow along and actually do the
math yourself.

Importance versus urgency
I think that I understand the difference between importance and urgency
and I think I understand what a person needs to do about them when
managing tasks (urgent matters always come before important ones within
limits but if important matters are aging without getting any attention
because your time is entirely consumed by urgent matters then you need
to block some time for important matters only) but I don't believe that
there is any task manager that actually supports this. Creating a
weighted mean of the two scores (as computed-score does) strikes me as
meaningless and misleading. What I do is just to assign a single number
representing priority, which is my mental pick for whatever composite of
importance and urgency is needed. I assign this to Importance and I
ignore the urgency field. I use importance numbers between 170 and 199
for sequencing tasks as needed: click on the importance slider and hit
the right or left arrow and watch the task jump up or down in the to-do
list.

Manual sorting
When you define a view as manually sorted, then MLO remembers, for that
view, the order for all of the tasks. This gives you total control over
the order. It also means that every time the order has to change (for
example because a due date is approaching) you have to go in and make
the manual adjustment. Also, every time you create a new task it will
not know where it belongs in the manual view until you go in and move
it. This can all add up to a lot of manage-the-task-manager time if you
are not careful. Also, with one exception (I forget which one it is)
when you synch a view to another device it does not bring its task order
across with it. If these drawbacks don't bother you too much then manual
ordering might be right for you

Close enough versus perfection
When I was starting out with task managers I used to try to make it so
that the next thing I should do would be at the top of the list. It
turns out that this is insanely timeconsuming and not really that
rewarding. Instead of thinking of the task manager as something that
will tell you what to do next, think of it as something that will
remember but hide all the stuff that you couldn't or shouldn't try to do
right now, leaving you with a short list of tasks to consider when
picking your next task. I am happy when the task I chose came from the
top five tasks on my list.

Conclusion
Most of my lists are sorted by importance. Some are by modification date
(the last thing I touched is at the top) and some by due date. The most
important thing for me in any view is making sure that every task that
doen't belong in that view gets dropped off. Order is less important.

Hope this helps,

-Dwight

[Stéph]

+1 to Dwight's point about avoiding getting yourself bogged down with managing the list, when you could be spending the time getting the tasks done. I also agree with his point that it's more important to filter task lists properly, so that only the relevant tasks are shown.

I'm one of the people who doesn't use computed score. GTD purists would say not to sort the list, but just to look through it each day and pick the most important (or urgent) tasks which fit within your current context. However, I'm not a GTD purist - I generally find I like to order my task by due date.  In some views, I group the tasks by some other criteria (top level project name, or context, for example), then order by due date within each group.

At the start of a week or day, I like to star the tasks which I definitely want to get done first. My starred list does tend to get a bit out of hand, though, because I always overestimate what I can do in a particular timescale.

Other than my outline view and my date-ordered tasklist, I do have a couple of special views: I have one view showing all my goals, grouped by role (ie by top-level parent). I have another view showing all my projects (and all their tasks), grouped by project status - This reminds me of the list of projects I should be working on, as well as the list of projects currently on hold which should be reviewed to see if they can restart. Finally, I have a view sorting and grouping my tasks by modified date, so it acts as a journal to track what I've been doing over the last few days (good for helping with completing timesheets).

Other than that, I like to keep the task parameters as simple as I can. I don't use importance and urgency at all, because that's just two more parameters to maintain, click and edit for each task, which takes up too much time.

Hope you find combined thoughts from Dwight and me helpful.

Regards,

Stéphane

[Ngozi Young]

Thank you Dwight and Stéph. I definitely agree with both of you guys. I've wondered how I should organize my task so that I can easily see what task I should complete next. I too agree that spending too much time managing your task rather than completing your task is counter productive. I did not find an easy and low maintenance solution so I decided to keep my task managing process very simple. 

Each morning, I review my task and sometimes I manually organize my list in order or other times I star the tasks that I want to work on and use a star filter view to only see the starred + active tasks. All the time spent sorting the task sometimes feels wasteful as it does not sync to other devices.

I do not enter much information in my tasks. I usually would but not always enter start dates, due date, context, and notes. I use reminders only for tasks that are time sensitive. When you are in the tasks completing mood then I use a filter to focus on those task. I agree with Stéph that filters is the way to go!

What I do need is tips on how to motivate myself to complete those overdue tasks! =D

[c.k. lester]

Hope you find combined thoughts from Dwight and me helpful.

Guys, thanks so much for the input! You've given me some ideas about tackling the order of my todo list.

I think one of the useful tools is the "Complete subtasks in order." Of course, that works for some things, but not for others. So, I try to build folders for those things that can be done sequentially, -or- I create hierarchies of tasks+subtasks, which also keeps things in order.

I think one of the things I'm going to explore is dependencies. That would seem to keep everything at a relative timeframe, especially since I'm rarely assigning Due Dates. Most of my tasks, apparently, don't need a Due Date. I just need to know that it needs to get done, but it should be done relative to other tasks.

One of the other things I've just done is created different tabs that show zoomed-in views of tasks. Is there a way to save a Tab so it is always available or can't be closed?

I'll probably need to review the user guide this week as well... I'm sure there are nuggets of info therein.