Manual Ordering and Dynamic Priority

[Eduardo Suarez]

I have lots of tasks (todos) and I would like to create a long backlog based on
my perceived priority.

I was thinking to deal with them in the following way:

- divide them in groups (categories or similar),
- manually sort priority for every group,
- mergesort groups, that is, start merging groups in pairs, and manually sort
  for every step the union group until I have a large sorted backlog.

For this to be practical, I would need an easy way to sort manually a group of
tasks and get them assigned automatically a priority (or any other hack) so
that priority ordering matches manual ordering.

Any idea about how to get this done?

If I had to implement it (I don't know lisp), I would assign a property (say
BACKLOG_PRIORITY) for every new task, with value the higher value of any other
tasks in agenda plus ten (for instance). Then I would query a subset of tasks
and sort them manually, swapping their values every time I swap their order. I
would also allow to assign a value directly based on free slots, not to bubble
the whole list for a low priority task.

Does it sound over-engineered? Any idea?