Agenda at Once, my current calendar/todo application of choice, founders on the way it aggregates priorities. It seems to me that the recursiveness of an outline structure can be leveraged to produce a truly intuitive way to assign priorities.

This is Agenda's option for aggregating priorities: "If checked, priority of parent task will be set as maximum of priorities of subtasks. Otherwise, it will be set manually."

Rather than determine the priority of the parent from the children, the application ought to determine the absolute priority of the ultimate child from the absolute priority of parent and the relative priority of the children. Or more specifically, if you have a 3-generation structure, Project A; Task a (subordinate to Project A); Subtask a1 (subordinate to Task a), Then the absolute priority of subtask a1 should be computed by rating the absolute importance of Project A; the relative importance of Task a to Project A; and the relative importance of subtask a1 to Task a.It should be the product of these values, where each is scaled from 0 to 1.

Just as it is easier to plan a document using Brainstorm's automatic hoist, it is easier to discover how important something is by hoisting on each level. That's the rationale. The output should be a flat list of ultimate subtasks, ordered by their absolute priority, calculated according to the foregoing.

There are two programs that sort of come close: Life Balance and MyLifeOrganized. For some reason both resist the multiplicative structure, EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE THE USER ASSIGN PRIORITIES RELATIVELY AS MY MODEL SUGGESTS IT SHOULD BE DONE. They each *tend* to give the result that the absolute priority of the Project determines the priority of the subtasks. I don't see how this can be considered anything but a blunder. Clearly, a task of critical importance for a moderately important project should be of higher priority than a task of marginal importance for a slightly more important project.

Stephen R. Diamond

[Stephen D.: They each *tend* to give the result that the absolute priority of the Project determines the priority of the subtasks.]

Indeed it does; in Project Management, effectiveness (getting the right things done) is more significant than efficiency (doing a lot of things). Often, reaching our goals will require dumping certain "projects" altogether.

Stephen R. Covey made a fortune with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, based on principles like that. Habit 3, "Put First Things First", is perhaps his most significant contribution to Time Management, so a book with that title followed. The grid he suggests for determining task priority has two scales: Urgency and Importance.

So a task can be:

Both Urgent and Important (i.e. crisis situation)

Important but Not Urgent (i.e. long term planning)

Urgent but Not Important (i.e. daily routine)

Neither Urgent Nor Important (i.e. time waster)

Covey's research showed that most busy-busy-busy people are usually doing the Urgent stuff, regardless of their importance. Effective people, on the other hand, only deal with the Important tasks.

So Habit 1, "Be Proactive" and Habit 2, "Begin with the End in Mind" are critical. It is the importance of the Project's End that will determine the importance of the Project's Tasks, never the other way around.

alx

Stephen concluded:There are two programs that sort of come close: Life Balance and MyLifeOrganized. For some reason both resist the multiplicative structure, EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE THE USER ASSIGN PRIORITIES RELATIVELY AS MY MODEL SUGGESTS IT SHOULD BE DONE. They each *tend* to give the result that the absolute priority of the Project determines the priority of the subtasks. I don't see how this can be considered anything but a blunder. Clearly, a task of critical importance for a moderately important project should be of higher priority than a task of marginal importance for a slightly more important project.
I can't speak for MyLifeOrganized, though it's a young program and will no doubt improve with feedback. But Life Balance at least is not guilty of the charge; I'm not sure what went wrong when you tested it, but try this:
Create a parent item with two subtasks called something like "higher priority task" and "lower priority task". Set the second task's Importance slider to a slightly lower value than the first's.
Now give each a subtask, called respectively "low importance subtask" and "high importance subtask", and set the slider for the first of these high and the second low. So you should now have:
parent item
higher importance task
low importance subtask
lower importance task
high importance subtask
Switch to to-do view, and you'll see the subtasks display in the correct order, viz.:
high importance subtask
low importance subtask.
You can also then experiment with slider adjustments to find the combination of importance levels at which the subtasks swap places. It seems quite sensibly calibrated to me, as you'd expect from an application that's been around long enough to bury the platform it was invented on. But see what you think, and perhaps post to the Llamagraphics forum (I see you've done so to the MyLifeOrganized one) if you see scope for improvement - unusually, their support responds to posts from trial-period users (except on platform-specific technical issues), and they take user suggestions for improvement very seriously. It's a long time since anyone's complained that the algorithms need tweaking, though, which suggests they've pretty much got it right for real-world use.