Big tasks and low-hanging fruit

A few years ago, I posted a feature request regarding the ability to show only low-effort tasks. What I wanted was a way to show low-hanging fruit - tasks that are relatively easy and that I can accomplish quickly. At the time I felt that this would be a useful feature if, say, I had a few minutes and wanted to pick off a few easy tasks.

I built a little application that takes an exported .lbe file and lists the tasks in order of increasing effort, weighted by their importance. In other words, important and easy tasks first. It's a bit rough around the edges - it doesn't take scheduling into account - but it's enough for my purposes.

Recently, however, I have been thinking more about my very long to do list, and how to manage it better. I tend to scan my to do list and pick and choose. When I have time and energy, I end up cherry-picking from the to do list. What can I do differently in LB so that it does all the work for me?

There are two parts to the answer. One is places. I have struggled with places for a long time. Way back, before I started using LB, I used the Palm built-in to do list instead. One of my "categories" was "schedule." This thinking was based on a time management seminar my employer had sent me to many years ago. The gist of it was "if it's less than 15-20 minutes' work, do it. Otherwise schedule it." So when I started using LB, I created a place called "schedule." In one of my many rearrangements of LB places I got rid of it. But now it's back.

The second part to the answer is that if LB tasks are too big, I tend to filter them in my mind. For example, when I go to the LB to do list and "do taxes" is at the top of the list, I just skip it. I know that doing taxes is several days work (well, for me it is anyway) so I avoid it. Is this good? I don't think so. If it's so much effort, surely it should be split up and/or scheduled?

I have established for myself some standards by which I assign effort to tasks, so it was pretty straightforward to write an app that lists the tasks with the highest effort. I can use that info to split the big tasks or set aside an actual day ("by calendar" rather than "by due date") on which I will sit down, take a few painkillers and "do taxes." Meanwhile, the task to schedule doing my taxes is a pretty light-weight task that takes place in my place called "schedule."

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