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: 2878

Posted by n.lowe
2005-03-01 07:53:37

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.

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