Newbie question re priorities, imports, recurrence

[Jeff Gordon]

Just getting started with both Cardo & TW and Cardo looks very promising. I had tried both a couple of years ago and want to try again. But I've got a couple of questions:

1. I want to use the "Eisenhower Matrix" instead of priorities. Cardo has 3 priorities. Is there a way that can be expanded to 4 (and ideally allow us to rename them) without having issues whenever Cardo gets updated?

2. I have a bunch of tasks I'd like to import into Cardo. When I looked at mGSD a long time ago, they had a tiddler that you could paste all your tasks into in a set format (one task per line) and that would create separate tiddlers/tasks for each line. Does either that feature exist in Cardo or would the TW import feature work? I looked at the export from the Cardo file and the parent fields look like they use GUIDs so would I need to prepopulate the GUIDs before importing or is there a way that I could use my actual Project Name when importing the tasks for a project? I probably don't need any other fields relating to the Parent Project other than the title.

3. Is there any way to have a Someday / Maybe Never for tasks? I see it for projects. I suppose I could make a Project called Someday / Maybe Never and put tasks into that.

4. I see recurrence but I don't understand where I would assign a recurrence to something. Can recurrences be assigned to both tasks and projects?

Thanks ... Jeff

[David Szego (Cardo)]

Hi Jeff, all good questions.. I'll answer inline.

1. I want to use the "Eisenhower Matrix" instead of priorities. Cardo has 3 priorities. Is there a way that can be expanded to 4 (and ideally allow us to rename them) without having issues whenever Cardo gets updated?

I'm unfamiliar with it... Any good pointers would be appreciated!

 

2. I have a bunch of tasks I'd like to import into Cardo. ... Does either that feature exist in Cardo or would the TW import feature work?

I looked at the export from the Cardo file and the parent fields look like they use GUIDs so would I need to prepopulate the GUIDs before importing or is there a way that I could use my actual Project Name when importing the tasks for a project? I probably don't need any other fields relating to the Parent Project other than the title.

 

I haven't got an import routine, but there is an "Assign GUIDs To Any Without" buried in there somewhere, from early development. The trick is that I use one Tiddler's GUID as the relationship link to another Tiddler. So, a Task would have it's own GUID, and a parent-project GUID field as well.

Assigning a Task to a Project will set the GUID fields for you, that's how they link.

Tasks, Projects, etc. are also tagged with "Project", "Task", and have a field that describes their "cardo-type".

Thinking about it, it's not actually that hard to write an import... but might be as much effort to export/import as to just re-add Tasks and Projects manually and then cut/paste the descriptions. I have to think this through.

3. Is there any way to have a Someday / Maybe Never for tasks? I see it for projects. I suppose I could make a Project called Someday / Maybe Never and put tasks into that.

Do an AdvancedSearch for a shadow Tiddler called "SomedayMaybe", and give it a Tag "TaskStatus". You can alter/add/remove any ProjectStatus and TaskStatus 's that way.

Really though, "Future" and "Dismissed" is pretty much "Someday/Maybe" and "Never".

 

4. I see recurrence but I don't understand where I would assign a recurrence to something. Can recurrences be assigned to both tasks and projects?

Recurring basically just removes the "Completed" checkbox and resets the due date, so it never really finishes. 

Glad you're using it, I'd love to know more about how, and your day-to-day use cases.

Cheers,

David.

[Jeff Gordon]

Thanks @David ... thanks for responding ...

Eisenhower Matrix is for understanding the difference between Urgent items and Important Items.

• A good summary of it is in this graphic (https://i2.wp.com/doist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/07/Eisenhower-summary-1.png?w=1472&quality=85&strip=all&ssl=1) 
• Here's a link to a full description of it ... https://doist.com/blog/eisenhower-matrix/. 

Although an additional use of Quad 4 is stuff that you've added onto your Task List that isn't worth doing and provides no real benefit (it's neither Urgent nor Important)... but that you thoughtlessly added onto your task list. And now you can't bear the thought of simply deleting it. Or maybe you think you'd LIKE to do it but there's no real benefit to doing it other than it sounds like it might be fun. So you assign it Quad 4 for a year and possibly never work on it. After a year or so, I'd probably either delete it or move it to Someday / Maybe.

Another use of Quad 3 for me are "urgent" items that are important so someone else but not to me. I have no interest in doing them. Someone else delegated them to me without me buying into it. So I need to think through whether that person is important enough to me that I should move it to Quad 1 & just do it or whether I should tell them no (and delete it) or I should move it to Quad 4 (and delay it indefinitely).

[David Szego (Cardo)]

> Cardo has 3 priorities. Is there a way that can be expanded to 4 (and ideally allow us to rename them) without having issues whenever Cardo gets updated?

I forgot to answer this one...

Look for a shadow Tiddler called "P2 - Medium" ... You'll see it's tagged "Cardo" (meaning it's a core Cardo Tiddler, I use that for exports and updates) and also tagged "PriorityLevel" -

Any Tiddlers tagged with "PriorityLevel" become just that.

You can name them whatever you like - that will be the long description, i.e. "P2 - Medium"

Describe them with a short-form, i.e. "P2"

Give them a field called "order" with a number.

This way you can re-name and organize P1 / P2 / P3 into "Do It", "Schedule It", "Delegate It", "Delete It"

HOWEVER ---

In my humble thinking, I already have that with the GTD TaskStatus buttons:

Next = Do It

WaitingFor = Delegate It

Future = Schedule It

Dismissed = Delete It

Seems like a direct mapping to me. You might just want to look for these Tiddlers and rename them!

Cheers,

David.