Re: 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: 2744

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-02-15 13:25:38

In my mental universe nothing is ever dumpde altogether. Maybe not in my *actual* mental universe, but in my idealized one. A project’s importance never falls to zero because of inexpediency, it only comes vanishingly close to zero.

But either way, the scheme I proposed works. The reduction in the absolute importance of the project sets a limit to the absolute value of any task or subtask that serves it. The principle of effectiveness is realized in the principle that the importance of a compontent part of a project can never be higher than the importance of the project.

The problem with contrasting effectiveness with efficiency in favor of the former is that obviously both are important, and strictly speaking, which is more important is a meaningless question absent a metric for measuring each. While it is true that the importance of a subtask can never exceed the importance of the project, it is also true that the absolute importance of a subtask can never exceed its relative importance for the project, or for that matter the relative importance of any link in the relative importance chain in the hierarchy.

Probably most people do react based on urgency as opposed to importance. But there are also some people who ignore urgent tasks, in favor of those having long-term importance. Somehow one must weigh importance and urgency. Urgency is naturally incorporated in the model by way of the relative importance. A task that is urgent must be done within a time frame, or the success of some project will be jeopardized. It acquires high relative importance, but the priority ultimately assigned will be limited by the importance of the goal (Project)it serves.

Essentially what I’m doing is just a simple application of decision theory to prioritizing. Absolute importance = utility; relative importance = expectation value.

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.—Alex

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