Interpretation of priorities in org-mode

Interpretation of priorities in org-mode

[Piotr Zielinski]

Hi.

I'd like to find out how different people use priorities (#A, #B, ...)
in org-mode.  I've always assumed the standard interpretation (#A =
high priority, #B = medium, #C = low).  However, the problem with this
approach is that what "high priority" means is not well defined, and
if you are not careful, then all your items will quickly become high
priority, which defeats the whole point.

I've been recently experimenting with a different interpretation of
priorities: #B = tasks to do today, #C = tasks to do this week, #D =
all the rest, default.  #A is reserved at the moment.  One good thing
about this system is a clearer interpretation of priorities.  Another is
that it separates the action of inserting new items into your todo
list and that of assigning a particular priority to them.  In
particular, at the beginning of each day, you can look at your list of
todos/deadlines/scheduled, and pick a few to complete on that day by
giving them the #B priority.  At any time of the day, the agenda will
show you these #B items clearly separated from the rest.  Previously,
I had to do a mental rescanning of the agenda items each time I
was wondering "what do I have to do now", which was rather stressful.

Of course, I've tried this only for a couple of days, so my
conclusions might be completely bogus.  Maybe there is a better way
than priorities to mark items as "to complete today".  I'd definitely
like to know what others think about it.

One more thing: it is nice to be able to separate items with different
priorities in an agenda view by some lines like '======= #A ======='
or similar.  I've also found it useful to separate deadlines from
scheduled items.  Your can use the following code to achieve this:


(defadvice org-finalize-agenda-entries (before local-org-finalize activate)
   (loop for (text priority) in '(("Scheduled        " 1400)
				   ("Deadlines        " 2000)
				   ("This week    (#C)" 2900)
				   ("Today        (#B)" 3900)
				   ("Top priority (#A)" 4900))
	  do (push (org-add-props
		       (format "=========== %s ==========" text)
		       nil 'priority priority)
		   list)))

(defadvice org-agenda-get-deadlines (after local-org-get-deadlines activate)
  (dolist (item ad-return-value)
    (put-text-property 0 (length item)
		       'priority (+ 500 (get-text-property 0 'priority item))
		       item)))


Thanks,
Piotr

Re: Interpretation of priorities in org-mode

[Bastien]

Hi Piotr,

"Piotr Zielinski" <piotr.zielinski@gmail.com> writes:

> I've been recently experimenting with a different interpretation of
> priorities: #B = tasks to do today, #C = tasks to do this week, #D =
> all the rest, default. #A is reserved at the moment. One good thing
> about this system is a clearer interpretation of priorities.

When i first started using priorities, i was also leaned to misuse them
as you describe, and my file ended up with top priorities everywhere.

After a while, i discover it was better:

1. not to upgrade priorities too easily;
2. not trying to make them do an other job than their job.

Let me explain myself a bit.

The #1 advice seems obvious but it is hard to stick to it. One problem
comes from Org-mode itself, because it makes it soooo easy to upgrade a
priority that you often feel like upgrading one -- instead of completing
the task under it :)

Another problem comes from the fact that priority are dependant from
each others. I think it's better to have something around 10%-[#A],
20%-[#B], and 30%-[#C], and changing the priority of a few tasks might
disturb the balance. 

So here comes the #2 advice. Because i noticed that the reflex of
upgrading too many [#B] to [#A] was just a way to make my Org files
"say" something else (yes, my Org files *speak*), like "Do it next!"
(which should be said by a TODO keyword) or "Do it today, you lazy 
bum!" (which could be said by the agenda...)

So i try to keep a reasonable number of high-prioritized tasks and if i
feel like i start to "upgrade" indecently, then i think twice about why
i'm doing this.

The thing is that i mainly use the priority system to have a useful
display of the agenda view:


(setq org-agenda-sorting-strategy
      '((agenda time-up priority-down)
	(todo priority-down)
	(tags priority-down)))


(Okay, all of this is very nice but here is the truth: i got *tons* of
chaotic tasks under misused priorities... but at least you get the way 
i would like to use them :)

PS: just thinking: another way to use priorities could be to make lower
tasks *dependant* (in they order of execution) from higher tasks. But i
would prefer to make this dependance visible by using the display order,
i.e. one task "after" another.

Regards,

-- 
Bastien

Re: Interpretation of priorities in org-mode

[Jason F. McBrayer]

"Piotr Zielinski" <piotr.zielinski@gmail.com> writes:

> I'd like to find out how different people use priorities (#A, #B, ...)
> in org-mode.  I've always assumed the standard interpretation (#A =
> high priority, #B = medium, #C = low).  However, the problem with this
> approach is that what "high priority" means is not well defined, and
> if you are not careful, then all your items will quickly become high
> priority, which defeats the whole point.

I don't really use priorities at all, since I'm using org-mode to do
GTD.  If something has to be done today, then that's a deadline, not a
priority.  If I don't need or want to get something done /in the next
week/, it probably shouldn't be crowding up my todo-lists at all, and
making it harder for me to find things I should be doing; it should be
on my someday/maybe list.

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Jason F. McBrayer                    jmcbray@carcosa.net  |
| If someone conquers a thousand times a thousand others in |
| battle, and someone else conquers himself, the latter one |
| is the greatest of all conquerors.  --- The Dhammapada    |

Re: Interpretation of priorities in org-mode

[Piotr Zielinski]

On 01/08/07, Jason F. McBrayer <jmcbray@carcosa.net> wrote:
> I don't really use priorities at all, since I'm using org-mode to do
> GTD.

I agree with you on that, I was only suggesting using priorities as a
technical means to label certain tasks as "to do today" in a way which
is easy in org-mode.

> If something has to be done today, then that's a deadline, not a
> priority.

As I said, my reason for scheduling certain tasks as "for today", is
that I like to have a plan of what to do each day.  Without an
explicit plan, I catch myself scanning my todo list many times during
a day, effectively wasting time on recreating the same plan many times.
But I've tried it only for a week now, so I can't say whether it works.

Thanks,
Piotr

RE: Interpretation of priorities in org-mode

[Egli Christian (KIRO 41)]

-----Original Message-----
From: emacs-orgmode-bounces+christian.egli=credit-suisse.com@gnu.org
[mailto:emacs-orgmode-bounces+christian.egli=credit-suisse.com@gnu.org]
On Behalf Of Piotr Zielinski
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 5:24 PM
To: Jason F. McBrayer
Cc: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: [Orgmode] Interpretation of priorities in org-mode

> > If something has to be done today, then that's a deadline, not a
> > priority.

> As I said, my reason for scheduling certain tasks as "for today", is
> that I like to have a plan of what to do each day.  Without an
> explicit plan, I catch myself scanning my todo list many times during
> a day, effectively wasting time on recreating the same plan many
times.
> But I've tried it only for a week now, so I can't say whether it
works.

What I do is that I schedule the tasks that I want to do on a particular
day. I also customize the agenda to show unscheduled TODOs, so my
(weekly) agenda shows me the tasks that haven't been scheduled (probably
not so important, a MAYBE in GTD speak) and the tasks that are scheduled
for a particular day. I look at the current day and see the tasks that
are up for this day.

What I'd like to do is to be able to schedule a task for a given week.
Say I know that I want to hand in a paper which is due in two weeks but
this week is very busy and I have no time to work on it. So I want to
schedule it for next week. At the moment I just schedule it for next
monday but I would like to be flexible next week and do the paper maybe
on another day next week depending on other load. Basically I would like
the agenda to show me something along the following:

ALL CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS:
  TODO:       TODO A task which has not been scheduled (probably a MAYBE
in GTD speak)
TODO ITEMS FOR THIS WEEK:
  TODO:       TODO Do the laundry (I move this task to a particular day
if I see that a day is not very busy during the week)
  TODO:       TODO write paper (see above)
Week-agenda:
Monday    30 July 2007
  TODO:       Scheduled:  TODO put the db where failover happens
Tuesday   31 July 2007
Wednesday  1 August 2007
Thursday   2 August 2007
Friday     3 August 2007
Saturday   4 August 2007
Sunday     5 August 2007

In this case I see that I will not be very busy this week and I can
easily write the paper and do the laundry. However if this would be a
busy week and there are tasks planned for every day I could decide to do
the laundry next week and just move it forward and not have to think
about it until next week.

I've looked at the code to implement this. I imagine using the iso 8601
week date format for week of the year (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601), i.e. YYYY-Www. The change is
quite invasive and touches a lot of areas of org-mode. It is currently a
MAYBE/SOMEDAY TODO item :-).

Christian

Re: Interpretation of priorities in org-mode

[Carsten Dominik]

On Aug 2, 2007, at 14:13, Egli Christian (KIRO 41) wrote:
>
> What I do is that I schedule the tasks that I want to do on a 
> particular
> day. I also customize the agenda to show unscheduled TODOs, so my
> (weekly) agenda shows me the tasks that haven't been scheduled 
> (probably
> not so important, a MAYBE in GTD speak) and the tasks that are 
> scheduled
> for a particular day. I look at the current day and see the tasks that
> are up for this day.
>
> What I'd like to do is to be able to schedule a task for a given week.
> Say I know that I want to hand in a paper which is due in two weeks but
> this week is very busy and I have no time to work on it. So I want to
> schedule it for next week. At the moment I just schedule it for next
> monday but I would like to be flexible next week and do the paper maybe
> on another day next week depending on other load. Basically I would 
> like
> the agenda to show me something along the following:

This sounds complex, and it seems to me that scheduling these things
for the Monday and then doing them during the week is still the
simplest solution.

- Carsten

Re: Interpretation of priorities in org-mode

[Stephan Schmitt]

Hello,

I think there are two possible interpretations of 'priority', /importance/ and 
/urgency/.

It is up to the user which is preferred.  You propose the interpretation as 
urgency: "I have to do that thing today/this week/sometime".  Importance may 
come into play with your daily decision, what to do next.  The advantage of this 
approach is the better quantifiability of 'urgency'.

At the moment in org-mode you have to opt for one interpretation.  But with the 
fresh and cool property feature in org-mode it should be possible to incorporate 
both aspects together.  Somehow.

Just a thought, though.

Greetings,
	Stephan

Piotr Zielinski wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I'd like to find out how different people use priorities (#A, #B, ...)
> in org-mode.  I've always assumed the standard interpretation (#A =
> high priority, #B = medium, #C = low).  However, the problem with this
> approach is that what "high priority" means is not well defined, and
> if you are not careful, then all your items will quickly become high
> priority, which defeats the whole point.
> 
> I've been recently experimenting with a different interpretation of
> priorities: #B = tasks to do today, #C = tasks to do this week, #D =
> all the rest, default.  #A is reserved at the moment.  One good thing
> about this system is a clearer interpretation of priorities.  Another is
> that it separates the action of inserting new items into your todo
> list and that of assigning a particular priority to them.  In
> particular, at the beginning of each day, you can look at your list of
> todos/deadlines/scheduled, and pick a few to complete on that day by
> giving them the #B priority.  At any time of the day, the agenda will
> show you these #B items clearly separated from the rest.  Previously,
> I had to do a mental rescanning of the agenda items each time I
> was wondering "what do I have to do now", which was rather stressful.
> 
> Of course, I've tried this only for a couple of days, so my
> conclusions might be completely bogus.  Maybe there is a better way
> than priorities to mark items as "to complete today".  I'd definitely
> like to know what others think about it.

Re: Interpretation of priorities in org-mode

[Renzo Been]

Hi,

Maybe I'm not that smart here...

But what is actually the difference between using:
*priorities

and:
*Using tags

You could make tags like this:
Urgent
Tomorow
Low

etc...

Ciao,
Renzo