Re: Automatically Increasing Priority

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

Hi Esben,

Esben Stien <b0ef@esben-stien.name> writes:

> Does there exist such a concept of automatically increasing priority
> after a while?

I'm not aware of any way of automatically changing the priority of a
headline, though if you really need this, it looks like it would be
fairly simple to do it in Elisp using the `org-map-entries' and
`org-priority' functions.  

I have the same problem you do: the priorities feature does not really
map well onto my work.  I used to capture a priority with every item,
but I've recently stopped doing that because I found it didn't make
sense for me.  I think it makes more sense to assign priorities
manually, when you're in a context of figuring out which tasks to work
on, rather than in a context of recording tasks to be done in the
future.

I suggest that, if you aren't doing this already, you put deadlines on
your TODO items, rather than priorities, and then sort the agenda by
deadline.  This has the advantage that it `prioritizes' all your tasks
in a natural way in the agenda: anything due soon (or past due) comes up
before things that are due later on.  So if you assign every task an
initial deadline, its `priority' will go up automatically, as time
passes.  When it comes due, you can always readjust the deadline if your
initial estimate didn't work out.

It's also useful, I think, to make one of your tasks a recurring weekly
review: go through all your other tasks, make sure you still want to do
them, adjust deadlines as necessary, etc.  If you find you still want
priority cookies in addition to deadlines, you could assign them during
this review for tasks due in the upcoming week.  At that point, you'll
be in a context where assigning priorities to these items makes more
sense, since you'll be looking at the other tasks each task competes
with.

Hope that helps!

Best,
Richard


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