Setting importance
Setting importance sliders meaningfully is a challenge. If I have two new tasks of equal importance to the same parent task, but enter them into LB on different days, they will probably end up with different importance settings. The importance setting is quite subjective, but doing it consistently seems important if I'm going to trust LB.
I have followed a suggestion posted by Reena (thanks Reena). This involves dragging the tasks under each parent into their order of importance. I then set the importance slider for each task, starting at the top with "essential" and moving each subsequent task's slider slightly lower than its predecessor. At least this is methodical and shows the relative importance of tasks in the list at a glance.
Every time the importance of a task changes relative to its parent, I change the position of a task in that parent's list. When I create a new task, I position it according to its importance. I then have to look at the previous and next tasks in order to set the importance slider somewhere between those two.
Does anyone have a different way of using the importance slider?
[ I could imagine that this process would be easier if there were an optional facility to set the importance of a task automatically to be the mid-point between the tasks above and below. Where there were no other tasks on the same level, the "essential" default would apply - as governed by the existing LB default. ]
Thanks!
RE: Setting importance
Hi Lloyd,
It sounds as if you're making a lot of extra work for yourself, particularly if you're talking about several tasks that are all 'once.' If you have several tasks that all have the same calculated priority, LB uses their order in the outline as a tie breaker to determine their order in the to-do list. I do part of what you describe (dragging the tasks under each parent into their order of importance) but I don't find it necessary to then adjust the importance of each individual task. I usually leave the individual tasks at essential, adjust the importance at the parent level, and leave it at that.
The only exception to this (in my outline) is when the parent task is just a container for similar tasks (i.e. Housecleaning Chores) rather than a goal or project (i.e. Remodel the Kitchen). When the parent is just a container for a loosely related list, I tend to leave the parent at essential and adjust importance for each task.
--Jon
RE: Setting importance
Thanks Jon,
It hadn't occurred to me that I could rely on LB's tie-breaker default. That will eliminate a lot of tinkering.
But when you say that you adjust importance for each task under a container, aren't you having to guess the importance slider, which is the problem I was trying to address?
RE: Setting importance
Hmmm. I don't think of it as 'guessing' so much as 'deciding.' I don't mean to dismiss your concerns; the importance scale is very granular, it's easy to unintentionally make a task more or less important than another, and I have ocassionally obsessed over such things. That said, I find it best to limit the amount of obsessing I do lest I spend more time listing than doing. Once a week I do a weekly review (I'm in the ninth or tenth week of unbroken GTD practice, woo hoo!) and one of the last few steps of my review is to set my to-do list to All Places/Include Closed Places and quickly scan all of my current to-dos, increasing or decreasing importances whenever something seems dramatically out of place. If the task that seems out of place is part of a project then I usually adjust the importance at the project/parent level rather than at the subtask level. If I do that then I rarely need to do much tweaking during the remainder of the week. Does that help, or do I misunderstand what you're having difficulty with?
--Jon
RE: Setting importance
Thanks. OK, but why stop at the parent? Why not adjust the grandparent? How do you know whether it is the siblings, parent, parent's siblings, grandparent etc. that is set incorrectly? Or is it usually either the parent or the task itself that's wrong?
I'm a little uncomfortable with tweaking the todo list because:
a) in effect you are comparing the importance of siblings, or even tasks on the same level from different projects; and
b) it means you can't trust the todo list
RE: Setting importance
I'm thinking that a concrete example of a specific situation you find difficult might help to illuminate your difficulties. Could you provide such an example?
Speaking generally, you can adjust the importance of the grandparent too, if you like. When I say I adjust the importance of the parent, I'm generally referring to projects where the parent task is the goal and the subtasks are the steps to reach the goal. Since the importance setting represents how important a given task is to accomplishing its parent, and since I rarely define subtasks for a project that are not essential to getting the project done, it is usually appropriate to leave the individual steps towards the project or goal set to essential. The project, however, may be more or less important than other projects, so that's the level at which I'm likely to set importance. Even so, that doesn't preclude me from adjusting importance settings at other levels of the outline as well.
I don't expect LB to make decisions for me; I expect it to help me make decisions for myself by breaking big, complex, dynamic decisions into small, simple, independent ones. When you say you "can't trust the to-do list," what are you seeing as a shortcoming? I'm not clear whether you're saying you want a list that is easy to manipulate so you get exactly what you expect, or perhaps that you want a list that doesn't make unexpected suggestions to begin with, or possibly a program whose workings are more transparent? Can you help me out here?
--Jon
RE: Setting importance
What I'm saying in essence is that the importance slider is completely arbitrary, therefore meaningless when set to anything other than 0% or 100%. That is, unless one can see all the other sliders on the same level for comparison.
RE: Setting importance
It is not possible to have a list of, say, 150 actions and know exactly perfectly how they should be ordered by priority. It is not possible for your mind to know those priorities exactly, and it's even less possible for Life Balance to create such a perfect list -- because it knows less about your life and subjective feelings of priorities than you do.
Life Balance knows only a tiny subset of what you know about your ToDos. Yet it does a remarkable job of giving you a reasonably ordered list with so little information.
You should not be uncomfortable with tweaking the ToDo list. First of all, your life, demands, and priorities change dynamically. The information you gave LB can quickly become out of date, and it's sometimes helpful to adjust it. Secondly, you may have made a mistake setting the importance slider.
"Why stop at the parent? Why not the grandparent?"
Exactly! This is one of the most awesome things about LB. If a project suddenly becomes less or more important, you can change the priorities of ALL the siblings with one stroke! Or even an entire TLI.
A few realizations have helped me use this feature effectively. One is not to tweak if items that seem to be near (within 7) where they should be. Order doesn't have to be perfect to be helpful. Two, you can't leave everything at "essential" when you have lots of stuff.
I think we tend to set the importance slider too high for some things because we are thinking about our Ideal Self, how we ideally "should" do something. On the other hand, its "true" priority may be less available for conscious inspection. And when working with the outline, we may tend to emphasize what ideally we should do and its importance to us. For example, I may put "Exercise" in my list, then think, Exercise is really, really important; I've got to set it at essential. But then when "Go running" shows up high on my ToDo list, I get annoyed and think, What's that doing before X? The reaction to the ToDo list better reflects the reality that I really *don't* think exercise is that important. Maybe my conscious, rational mind does; but the other 99% of my mind doesn't.
The feedback from LB, whether it seems right or wrong, can really help increase self-awareness.
The more things you have in an AllActions list, the harder it's going to be to be happy with each local priority. It's a combination of using Places to filter out what you can't do, PLUS the prioritization algorithm, that give you *helpful*, manageable lists with the stuff you want to tackle first near the top.
So set the importance slider exactly as directed. Look at your ToDo list. Look for items that seem grossly misplaced, especially related items. If there are related items, adjust the topmost parent of those related items. If you want to adjust it up but it's already there, then look for something else that needs to go down.
RE: Setting importance
Thanks for your reply. The essential point seems to be that the importance slider is subjective. I have to accept that the settings are never absolutely right, so they require adjustment as a matter of routine.