Re: Manual Ordering and Dynamic Priority

[Ihor Radchenko]

Eduardo Suarez <esuarez@itccanarias.org> writes:

> 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?

It sounds like you just want to have a list of active projects and
select one top-priority task at a time from each project. The projects
can be simply a headline with all the tasks listed as children.

I do not recommend assigning priority as a number. From my experience,
it is much easier to order the tasks manually inside a project. You will
need to re-order things as the project progresses anyway. Fiddling with
numbers will quickly become unmanageable.

I also do not recommend listing _all_ the tasks. It is much more
productive (again, from experience) to list the one top-priority task
for each project and nothing more until you finish the current task
batch. In GTD, this is usually done by assigning NEXT todo keyword to
the top-priority task, while all others are assigned as TODO. You may
also leverage org-edna package to flip TODO->NEXT once you complete the
current NEXT task.


-- 
Ihor Radchenko,
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