ForumsQuestionsHow Important is "Important?"


How Important is "Important?"
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556241

Posted: Apr 27, 2011
Score: 0 Reference
How can I tell what is important and what is not? High? Medium? Low? They are ALL important! How can I compare seeing the grass to calling the baseball coach? If I don't seed the grass, the wife will not be happy. If I don't call the coach, the kids will not be happy.

Myself, I think doing the taxes is more important, but the happiness of the others and the timeliness of it… It's so much like trying to compare apples to oranges…. I thought this Toodledo thing would help, and all I'm getting so far is an overwhelm: a fruit salad that's fast turning into mush.
Jake

Toodledo Founder
Posted: Apr 27, 2011
Score: 0 Reference
If all of your tasks have the same importance to you, then it will be hard to prioritize. My suggestion is to attempt to decide which tasks are more important than others and use the priority field to capture this. You can also use due-dates to put some tasks off into the future.
556241

Posted: Apr 27, 2011
Score: 0 Reference
Yes, it IS hard to prioritize. You got that part of what I was saying. Thanks! But my question I was trying to have answered is, how do I decide what IS more important? As I look down the list, I ask "Is this important? Yes. How much? Well, it just DOES need to get done. It's not any less important than anything else that I can afford to NOT have it done. So, my question is, how do I decide what is more or less important than anything else when ALL of it needs to and will, at SOME time, just get done anyway?
Jake

Toodledo Founder
Posted: Apr 27, 2011
Score: 0 Reference
Toodledo does not have the mind reading technology to know that "seed the lawn" is more or less important than "call the coach". You'll have to do this part yourself and set the priority field as appropriate.
piyush_soni

Posted: Apr 27, 2011
Score: 0 Reference
No system can decide the relative priority and importance of tasks for you - it's you only who can and has to do that. The system can only help to organize that information.

As Toodledo said, due-dates can be one of the measures of importance.

From your example, if I know that taxes are due after two months, may be my wife's happiness is more 'important' right now. But if taxes are due tomorrow and I'm still not finished, may be I'll first do this and the family happiness could probably be taken care of after that.

Other measure could be length of the task - according to you. If you think calling the coach would just take 5 minutes, you'd do that even if the taxes are due tomorrow. But may be you'd postpone seeding the grass until tomorrow after doing the taxes; because both of these are time consuming tasks.

In life you always have to compare apples to oranges, as you only have 24 hours in a day. It is only in scientific calculations that we don't do that.
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