Hi Ken,

I, too, wasn't comfortable with LB until I understood the sorting mechanism. It took awhile, partly because I tend to jump in and play with tools instead of reading the manual. The 'advice book' does contain a lot of helpful information, but I mostly know that because I've seen helpful things quoted from it; I've never read it all the way through.

Anyhow, importance is the primary sorting criteria. Between any two tasks that are eligible to appear in the to-do list, the one that has a higher overall importance is the one that appears higher on the to-do list. A caveat is that the importance is adjusted for date-specific tasks that aren't yet due or nearly due. If the task is marked NOW or OVERDUE then it's said to be at full importance, but if it's more than one lead time from due then it's marked soon and treated as if it's importance were somewhat lower.

If tasks have identical importance then the tie is broken according to the tasks' timing traits; By Calendar tasks come first, followed by By Due Date, then Routinely and finally Once.

Effort settings, just to be clear, have no effect on sort orders.

The only thing that can override importance in determining sort order is the 'Balance my effort' feature. If you've told LB that you want it to encourage you to balance your effort a fair bit, and your desired and actual pies are out of whack, lower-importance tasks from a neglected TLI can be sorted above higher-importance tasks from an overworked TLI.

With that background info established, a couple of things in your post jump out at me. For one, don't expect the to-do list to be the one and only place you look for an indicator of what to do. If you want a list of what you must do today, look to the calendar. That's what it's for. The to-do list is better used to determine the best thing to do in those interstices of your day when you actually have the freedom to choose.

Another thing, and some may disagree with me on this... don't use By Due Date scheduling. Maybe that's an overstatement; perhaps I should say "only use By Due Date scheduling if you must." My sense is that the By Due Date scheduling option exists on the LB desktops primarily because it exists in the Palm version, and it exists in the Palm version because it makes sense for LB to be able to sync with native Palm applications (Palm's to-do list program) which in turn can sync with other applications like MS Outlook. If you don't use a Palm or, if you do, if you don't sync with Outlook, then By Due Date is just a handicapped version of By Calendar; it lacks the fancy repeat functions, and By Due Date tasks don't appear on the LB calendar, which is why you find yourself digging through the to-do list to make sure you didn't miss one. Use By Calendar scheduling whenever you can.

I don't quite get why Llamagraphics would've suggested that you to set all your tasks' importances to Somewhat. I don't know how to shed light on that unless you were to post the ticket and response.

I hope that helps.