For a todo list manager truly outliner-based

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2737

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-02-15 03:10:31

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

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