New Priority Feature

Today we launched a new feature. The ability to set a priority to an action or a project.

As seen in the below screen shot, you will find this feature in the right panel at the top.
Just click on the flag icon and choose the priority of your choice.

While in Projects and Actions view you can see an indicator of what priority your item is directly to the left of the item. Red is for high priority, Orange for medium and yellow for low. When no priority is set we keep the display as it normally shows. The below screenshot shows how this looks. It’s subtle, but definitely catches your eyes enough to alert you that you have an action or project that needs special attention.

Future enhancements to this feature: We will soon add the display of priority to other views like Next and Focus. Also we will add a keyboard shortcut. When grouping and sorting is added, priority of course will be part of those features.

A quick note for GTD purists: While even David Allen admits that he will flag items in his lists in different ways when he wants to call his attention to an item. You may choose to ignore this feature and pretended it didn’t even happen!

Enjoy and let us know your thoughts on this new feature. Thanks for being a GTDNext user!

Great to see this development! I wish that a project’s prio (and due date) would show for its sub-tasks in the Next-view

This is great, thanks for adding Priorities!!

I’ve been using GTDnext for about 4-5 months, and while I use it heavily I don’t know all the ins and outs yet. What do you mean when you say “when grouping & sorting is added”? And how far off is it? Because it sounds like that is what would solve my remaining issues with the app (well, that and an android app) and I got excited when I read that phrase.

My main pain point right now is that I can’t sort the views. Areas & tags go a long way, but I still want to sort within my filtered lists. Especially the Projects.

Glad you like it! Priority is now shown in focus and next views. That was always the plan, just a few days behind the initial launch of priorities. Due dates have always shown in the next action and focus views.

That means that eventually we will have the ability to group items in the next and focus list. So for example you would be able to see all your Next Actions grouped by Priority or Tag. This has been on our roadmap for quite some time. We just have other more important things that have prevented us from getting this done. It’s still on the list, but no date at this point. I’m very excited about this one as well!

[quote=“James, post:4, topic:682”]
Due dates have always shown in the next action and focus views. [/quote]
Yes they are for individual tasks. But what I meant is for the project settings to be displayed in the Next-view. So if I mark a project with a due date or priority, then its tasks should somehow highlight these settings in the Next-list.

Ah, I see. Yes that is harder. It’s difficult because there are also cases where even though the project has a due date and a is high priority the tasks themselves might not be of same priority or due on the same date as the project. It could get messy and confusing to try to show the projects information on the same line as the next actions info.

I think for now, we will keep this the same as today. We do have the project name there and so you can easily click that to see all of the project info…

Keep the ideas coming. While we don’t always agree and implement them all, we love to see them!

I understand your reasoning :slight_smile: My suggestion would be to either have a separate field for project attributes or display them as task attributes but overwrite when a task has its own attributes.

We try to keep things as simple as possible. So I’ll think about this. Can’t think of a simple way to do this yet that doesn’t prompt confusion.

A quick note for GTD purists: While even David Allen admits that he will flag items in his lists in different ways when he wants to call his attention to an item. You may choose to ignore this feature and pretended it didn’t even happen!

I get this, but I can’t see a reason to have both Focus and Priority. I think it would be more elegant to replace Focus with Priority. I guess I shouldn’t care about something that I can just ignore, but to me the purpose of the software is to help the user implement GTD, To some extent, the software should gently persuade the user to think about their work in the GTD style. Past some point, additional flexibility is a detriment to this.

I think the Priority feature is an excellent addition to GTDNext. For me, it serves a different purpose than Focus.

Focus, to me, is a tentative selection of what a think I will try to get done later today (now). It can be a mix of critical and uncritical things that I tentatively pre-select and want to keep handy during the day, often because they match (e.g. in terms of context) other items I definitely intend to do. For example, if I have an appointment somewhere I might tentatively also Focus a few errands nearby, even if they are not particularly urgent or important. (And if I can’t make it I just unFocus them later.)

Priority, in my personal view, is a longer-term classification. It usually remains stable for days or weeks or even months. In my opinion, it is best interpreted as the “longest acceptable interval between reviews” (i,e, checking whether right now is a good time to do it). For a next action or waiting for action, in my mind low “priority” means I need to check it at least once per week (weekly review), normal “priority” means at least once per day (daily quick scan), and high “priority” means “whenever I look at the list”. I have been doing this for a few years now (using whatever features I have had available and have been able to bend to that purpose) and it works beautifully. It vastly reduces the time required for my morning scan, and also helps me pay attention to the things that really deserve my attention. And it does not stop me in any way from selecting to actually do tasks of any priority - they are all still in the same list, not hidden away, and I can choose or ignore as I please.

I realize that the word “priority” can be interpreted in lots of different ways. For example, you can interpret it as importance/urgency. Or as likely timeframe for execution. Etc. The above definition coincides very strongly with most of these kinds of definitions but has the great advantage that it is easier to “answer” consistently regardless of how agitated or calm you are, overworked or underworked - “How soon do I want to consider this again?”. If the answer is “weekly review” then put “Low”, if the answer is “daily scan” then put “Normal”, and if the answer is “every time I look at this list” then put “High”. (For Someday I use longer time intervals, where Normal means weekly.)

Even David Allen uses the word priority in several entirely different senses, and sometimes emphasizes the fundamental importance of it, sometimes advises against it. His teachings may sound contradictory to some, but that is mainly because he is reusing the same word for entirely different things. The kind of prioritization he usually argues fervently against is ABC prioritization.

App tip: I think it would be good to be able to set the default priority for new tasks to be Normal. I also think the colors could be made easier to distinguish.

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As @Folke mentions up above, quite a few people use the focus system for something other than priority. It seems about half the people I talk to use focus as some sort of priority mechanism, while the rest us it to flag items they want to work on today, or during the next “work period”.

We knew adding the priority feature might cause some confusion for those people in the first camp. The people that use focus current for an on or off level of priority. We did feel however, that overall it would be a good addition.

The next step we are planning, which will help to minimize the confusion, is to renaming and change the functionality of the focus feature. Focus will become “Today” (or something like that) and in addition to next actions you flag for “today”, we will automatically add items with a due date of today and are looking at automatically adding items with a start date of of today.

People can then have a one stop place for items that should either be done today or reviewed today. They can always take the “today” flag off an item or reschedule a due date to keep the “Today” list nice and clean and representative of what they should work on right now. I picture this list changing frequently, just like my focus list does, based on DA’s four-criteria Model for choosing actions. My context, my time available, my energy available and priority.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve missed a deadline or two, because I didn’t see a due date in my next action list. This will help alleviate that issue. It will also be less confusing for people who thought of focus as a priority indicator. For people that use focus today as a means to flag items they want to focus on today, it should still work just as well and actually enhance the experience.

Anyway that’s some of our future thinking based on adding the priority feature. Thoughts?

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@Folke @James You know now that you explain it, I do see the value in having both.

Folke 's idea for defaulting to medium Priority makes sense as an option. If you were to do this, it might make sense to reconsider how things of different priority appear, because in this case everything would be marked with some shade of red.

@James Thank you for your engagement with users. It’s very interesting to watch this product develop and evolve.

+1 for default medium priority

And the colors of no and low priority are so light, I can see them on my screen only if I know it’s there.

Would it be possible to sort the Next-list according to priority?

Now that the new UI is (mostly) done we have plans to add a lot more features. More filtering and sorting options is one of them.