Manual sorting of actions on Next Actions List or Focus List

(Originally posted on uservoice and moved to this forum) by Heath

The beta version doesn’t seem to let you manually move tasks up or down in their order. It seems as though it follows the over they fall in on the Projects list. I would like to be able to manually order the actions on the Focus or Next List. More importantly on the Focus list. Order to me denotes importance so I would always put my most important tasks that I’m working on or focusing on on top of the list. Where as in my project list I typically list them alphabetically.


James responded · May 05, 2014
Yes, that is planned too. That is how we anticipate users will define priority, by the location in the focus or next action list.

FolkeFolke commented · May 06, 2014 08:29
I agree that manual sorting is very nice and useful, particularly for the Focus list. On the Next actions list manual sorting is often too cumbersome to be the main tool, but is still a valuable extra feature.

For both the Next and Focus lists it would be great to have automatic grouping options (like both Nirvana and Doit have), for example by project, by context, by due date, by priority or whatever features GTDNext will eventually have available. Manual sorting is still valuable within such groups, for example the ability to place Errands in the order you will visit different places.

I agree that the list position can be a good indicator of “doing priority”, i.e. the order in which you think you will do things. It is not a suitable indicator for a task’s “criticality”, however, because you may have decided to do something relatively unimportant first of all for purely contextual reasons, or may have decided to let something very important wait until some other day for such practical reasons. And you still want these to be easy to see.

I see no contradiction at all between a manually sorted “doing priority” and a color coded “review attention priority” as described in http://gtdnext.uservoice.com/forums/246700-general/suggestions/5889004--review-attention-or-priority They both serve useful and very different purposes.

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Yes, I see another plug for your color idea here @Folke. :smile: