Jatabag

Task prioritization is a lie

Setting a priority on a task is a lie.

Flagging a task as important is a lie: it implies other tasks are unimportant.

Labeling a task high/med/low is a lie: it inaccurately requires rounding to the nearest whole "label". (Assuming their label was rounded correctly and stays correct over time.)

Tagging integer-ranges like 1-5 is a lie: it's arbitrary. Heck, why not 1-1000? Assigned numbers are made up on the spot, inherent lies.

These methods of assigning priority are ineffective, inaccurate, and counterproductive. They are lies.

Pitfalls of Priority

Even when tasks are given dilligent prioritization, those tasks routinely fail to enter our consciousness at the right time!

The following are just a few reasons this turns out to be the case:

Relativism

- Repair broken toilet #high
- Mow the lawn #low
- Pay overdue rent #high

"Repair broken toilet" is probably high priority relative to "Mow the lawn", but what is its priority relative to "Pay overdue rent"?

How many bathrooms does your building have? How many days overdue is the rent? The answers to these questions materially change their priority.

Many tasks assume the status of being "high priority", but if so, which one is highest? It's unclear.

Jatabag's solutions (there are so many)
  • Pin tasks that deserve focus sooner (while keeping them in view)
  • Snooze to remove 1 of the 2 "high priorities" from Focus
  • Use Blocked By to indicate one must be done before the other.
  • Make "Pay overdue rent" a subtask of "Repair broken toilet", so that it must come first.
  • Pay your rent! Which leads us to:

Pre-emptive completion

High priority tasks occasionally get completed before they even get written down, let alone prioritized. This makes sense, they're high priority, after all! But it invites doubt into the entire concept of what "high" priority even means.

It's plausible that we need a higher priority than "high", such as "immediate". Which is a pretty confusing thing to have to think about.

Perhaps tasks considered to be "immediate" don't warrant writing down, while "high" does. Sure, that's fair. But it's worth noting the conflation/clash of "high" and "immediate", and how writing down a high priority task calls into question just how high of a priority it is.

Duplication and noise

Flat lists are difficult to assign priorities to:

- get groceries #low
- apples #low
- oranges #low
- bread #low
- get gas #high
- get mail #low

Noisy, and editing those tags sounds like a pain! Find-and-replace sounds like a risky maneuver as well....

Jatabag's solution

Propagate/cascade tags

Note: This example shows that propagation/cascading tags could be used to solve the noisiness and duplication of the above example. However, know that using tags to prioritize is still considered counterproductive for all the reasons described here!

The sheer passage of time changes priorities

Say your project is due 1 month from now. You mark it as low priority.

3 weeks pass and you haven't started. Is it still low priority? Probably not!

Typical workarounds for this range from simple but flimsy, such as setting a reminder 5 days before the due date, or complex and expensive, such as deploying an entire Gantt chart.

Jatabag's solution

due in 1 month

3 weeks later

Capitulation and Fragmentation

Have you ever written down a prioritized list on physical paper (even while maintaining a separate todo list in an app)?

Making a physical list capitulates to the limitations of the app, and fragments where you source your tasks from. Lose the physical list, lose what you were trying to focus on. Moreover, you need to hand copy completions into the app itself.

This list is your "high priority" list, ephemeral for the day, and it really isn't a bad way to go about prioritizing, by any means. You're "lifting" tasks to the top, but you're using a physical medium to do it.

Still, the act of lifting is key, because you're hand-picking what needs your Focus.

"Priority" is weak version of "Focus"

Because when all is said and done, focus is what priority refers to, right?

For any task tracking app that you use, stop the constant clerical bookeeping required to mark priorities.

Instead of assigning priority, try lifting the tasks that need focus, however your app allows you to do that. Whether it's bringing tickets up to the top of the swimlane, cut/pasting plaintext to the top of a list, or hand-writing a list of the things you want to focus on.

My trees