Brainstorm-like to do list

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3424

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-06-24 22:26:49

I had posted a few months ago on the concept of rating task-importance on a to do list relative only to its immediate parent, calculating the absolute importance by a multiplicative scheme derived from simple decision theory. Basically it entails multiplying the importance at each level by the preceding level. So if you have task a as part of Project B subserving goal III, you would rate the importance of a relative to B, the importance of B relative to III, and the absolute importance of III, on a 0 to 1 scale, such that the combined importance of an item’s children never exceeds 1. (This is mathematically trivial for those who have had a dab of probability theory; it may be meaningless to anyone who hasn’t.)

I proposed this approach in the user forum for “My Life Organized,” and it quite caught on and was adopted by the developer. But it wasn’t a novel scheme, even though I hadn’t seen it before in a pim. This is also the approach taken by Life Balance, something I didn’t glean from the Life Balance forum but did learn about in this forum.

However, there’s a glitch with this method that I think considerably lessens the value of the implementation in both of these task managers. It ignores that tasks will subserve more than a single project and projects will subserve more than a single goal. This may sound like a quibble, but I think it’s a more serious criticism, because of the counter-productive motivational effects of ignoring this cooperative functioning of tasks. A task that serves more than a single goal will be systematically under-evaluated by this heuristic. You should want to do tasks that serve several goals at the same time. A user guided by the heuristic in its present incarnation will tend to avoid tasks that overlap this way, because he doesn’t get full “credit’ for them.

So what you need in this kind of program is cloning of tasks, summing their importance over the multiple places the task and its clones appear in the outline. If anyone else finds this topic interesting, there’s some discussion in both the MLO (http://www.mylifeorganized.com) and Life Balance (http://www.llamagraphics.com) forums. The fuller discussion has developed in the LB forum, although without any input from the developer. It’s here: http://tinyurl.com/9sgs3

Stephen R. Diamond

Back to archived message list