Vitalist Preview #4: Priority
March 20th, 2007 / 37 CommentsOne major concept to take from GTD is the notion of “Next Actions.” However, these “next actions” can be tricky to denote in an online application, especially when you add the fact that many people will view “next actions” differently.
We have thought long and hard about “next actions,” and have come up with what we feel will be a nice solution: Priority. In Vitalist, priority will let you determine which actions are the most important. Priority also gives you another indication of when you should work on an action, other than due date.
Here is a screenshot of priorities in action (click to enlarge):
You can quickly change an actions’ priority by simply clicking on the star icon. This will toggle the action through all of the different priority levels: high, medium, low, and none. And what if you want to quickly see your High Priority actions? There is a filter available in the sidebar that is only one click away.
For such seemingly small addition, we feel adding priority to Vitalist will make it much more powerful. Hopefully you will agree.
If you haven’t already, make sure to check out Vitalist Preview #1: Contexts as Tags, Vitalist Preview #2: Sub Projects, and Vitalist Preview #3: Quick Add/Edit.
And again, stay tuned for more previews coming up.
Can’t wait for the update!
Good Job.
Yea. When will be the updates come out?
You know you guys have us totally drooling right now… these updates look great. Can’t wait to use them.
OK. I am excited with all of the new features. When will the next release be available?
How about adding a Blackberry client?
I used Vitalist for a short time, but stopped using it because it lacked some important features regarding project management (for example, marking a project as Done.) With these new features, I’ll definitely be trying it out again, and I may move my system back to Vitalist eventually.
Will there be any way to limit the number of priorities that are available to click through? This would be useful for those of us who only want to star/un-star next actions without having to rotate through 4 states of priority. A setting to limit this would be great. Regardless, I am really impressed with all of these features and I will definitely be integrating more of my projects into vitalist when they are rolled out. I appreciate how you guys have struck a nice balance between a simple interface and allowing the flexibility for the user to make the system work for them instead of the other way around.
Keep up the good work!
Quit teasing us
Seriously, I think priority is a fine implementation for next actions. Today I just put a list in notes, with the next action as the top item. Example:
-Next Action
-The one after that
-Things after that
Sub-projects and priorities will be a welcome alternative.
[…] Drag-and-drop ordering for actions in each list (and, coming soon, priority stars and sub-projects) […]
Question about the new feature you won’t let us have yet
I realize the filtering option will allow me to restrict to just high priorities, for example, but will we also be able to sort tasks/actions by priority or will we manually sort them like today?
You will be able to sort by Priority, as well as Due Date. I didn’t mention this yet, but if you look closely in the picture you will be able to see the sorting options.
You must mean the part where it says “Sort”?
Sorry, I missed that should-have-been obvious clue
Regardless, good news on the feature.
When our Vitalist-friends say they will release the updated version end of march, they mean end of march right
? So this week we'’l have the better version of one of our favourite web apps!
We shall see erwin. I, like you, am eagerly awaiting the unveiling. I’m currently using 3 products and really want to start paying for one and eliminating the other two. The Vitalist people really seem to get it, have stuck a nice balance between simplicity and features, and I suspect that once the new version is unleashed, I won’t be able to resist upgrading.
Erwin,
You are right. We are still planning on on releasing our update at the end of the week. Everything is still on schedule right now, so be on the look-out.
Matt
I’m not sure that a low/med/high priority will be a good thing. Every other to-do list manager has this same concept. What makes something a low vs. a med vs. high? Each of us has to define what that is and manually prioritize and re-prioritze. Too much work on my part and not enough work being done by the application. I don’t think we generally “think” in terms of high and low. Maybe for a few specific things. For those of us with too much to do and not enough time to do it, don’t we really “think” in terms of due dates? Some things are due on a specific date but most things are due in a fuzzy “today”, “tomorrow”, “this week”, “next week”, “this month”, “soon”, etc. Yes, i could implement this by picking a corresponding due date but that would make it difficult to separate the “real” due dates from the “non-real” due dates.
Bob, I share your “too much to do and not enough time to do it” problem. I don’t want to spend my time moving to dos or setting unnecessary attributes like priority or due date, unless it meets my need. This is one of the reasons I don’t use Outlook and many other products. Not that I couldn’t tweak them to work, but it wastes a lot of my time.
Vitalist is a flexible as you want to be, and it will be better with the new release. Remember that you don’t have to use due dates or priorities — I like having the option thought. And, as noted above, you can sort by Due Date or Priority. Hopefully, it automatically sorts by high/med/low within due date.
With the new tags feature, I will use these tags: TODAY, TOMORROW, THIS WEEK, NEXT WEEK, SOON, SOMEDAY.
- During my weekly review, I will setup my THIS WEEK items, and my TODAY items.
- The stuff I really have to get done today will be tagged as TODAY.
- As today progresses, I will start to accumulate things for TOMORROW. If I was super-disciplined, these would never get into my TODAY list in the first place. If I insist on putting them in TODAY, I could set these want-to-dos with a priority of medium.
- As the week progresses, I start to make my candidates for NEXT WEEK. I could use HIGH and MEDIUM to separate the must haves and want to haves. I could also just use a NEXT WEEK MUST DO tag and a NEXT WEEK WANT TO DO tag.
- My SOON items need attention in the next 30 days. I don’t put due dates on these unless there is an explicit due date.
- My SOMEDAY items are the things I just feel the urge to keep. I seem to keep them as actions instead of the SOMEDAY list.
- Hopefully we will now be able to drag between tags. I’m not sure if this is in the new features or not.
Anyway … just thought I’d share my approach to the problem. In short, I use contexts/tags to group my tasks by due date. I don’t set a due date unless I really need to for my reference. I won’t use priority unless I need to.
Mike, good suggestion to use the new tag capability to help prioritize. Once the new version is released I’ll see about trying to apply it. The only downside to this approach, IMHO, is that it is still a far too manual process. I want the application to work for me, not me work for the application. With the tag approach, as time moves forward, the prioritization will not change automatically. I have to manually review and re-prioritize. Ideally, once I determine that something is an action and that it needs to be completed by “NEXT WEEK” , the application should be able to re-prioritze this action as time moves forward. In 7 days, its priority should change from “NEXT WEEK” to “THIS WEEK”. And a few days later, to “TOMORROW”. I can still do my weekly review and reset priorities as needed. But between reviews, the application is working for me.
I think Vitalist is a great application and I’m doing my best to spread the word.
Bob, if you find the application that does that holler
In the mean time, I’ll be helping you spread the word about Vitalist.
Mike
p.s. By the way, if the next cool version of Vitalist doesn’t allow us to drag actions between tags, I will stick with my approach from today which is to have a tag for each context (example: WORK) and actions that I use as separators. Example:
=====> Must do today Must do this week Must do today
Our goal with the new features is to simply make Vitalist as flexible as possible. We have learned from our feedback that no two people use the system in the same way.
We hope that sub-projects, tags, and priorities will make it easier for our users to adapt the Vitalist system to their own approach.
Can’t waaaaaait!
Actually I’m not sure I wanna use priorities. Sounds like RTM, I had to reprioritize stuff every hour, waste of time. A single star would do, and also, we don’t want to click thru all levels of priorities to remove/add a star.
And please tell me you are adding keyboard shortcuts for this, or I’ll cry. (Nowadays we cannot allow ourselves the luxury to click on stuff, instead of hitting a key.)
I really like Bob’s suggestions. I think this matches well with the way people really prioritize actions.
For my way of working, think this could be easily implemented by simply setting a “due date” on all actions as a flag to indicate the approximate timeframe you want to complete the task, and having views that show the action list grouped by “today”, “tomorrow”, “this week”, “next week”, “this month”, etc - sort of like the dashboard does now but with more categories.
Now the problem is that this confuses _real_ (hard) due dates with “I’d _like_ to complete this by” dates. So a flag to indicate if the due date is “hard” or “soft” might be added - hard dates would appear in your calendar, soft ones would not.
You could even add shortcut buttons when creating an action to allow you to click “next week” (for example) and it would populate the “soft due date” for you with a date at the end of next week.
I have my whole mind dump just waiting for this update!!
I anticipate a lifehacker writeup coming soon. I installed Opera mini browser on my blackberry as my dedicated Vitalist channel (it handles the mobi page better than BB’s browser) and I also put a portable Firefox config bareboned down to be Vitalist friendly on my USB drive. Fantastic GTD suite Vitalist team!!
Are we still on track for the update by the end of the week. I am getting carpal tunnel from checking the website for the next preview…
I think they’re too busy to answer. When i wake up, there wille be a new Vitalist!
This is getting silly. Did you use GTD to produce the new version? End of the week, end of the month, either way, where is it???
The update will be happening this evening. So when you wake up in the morning you will have a shiny new version of Vitalist.
O.K. Guys, good to hear!
Will that be wake up GMT, EST, PST or what?
I think these updates will make Vitalist THE “go-to” GTD app on the web.
Nice work!
Seems there are bugs in the new implementation. These are some that I have run into
a. Priority icons do not show up on Camino browser
b. All my items under someday have disappeared and show up else where.
Seems there are bugs in the new implementation. These are some that I have run into
a. Priority icons do not show up on Camino browser
b. All my items under someday have disappeared and show up else where.
PS: I am a fan of Vitalist
The colour coding of the priorities confound me though; I usually think of High Priority as Hot. So red as hot!hot!hot! works well for the highest priority. The blue Medium Priority star feels a lot cooler than the yellow Low Priority though.
Perhaps it’s just me, but a Low-Med-Hi colour coding scheme with Lightblue-Yellow-Hotred would feel more logical to me at least.
Keep up the good work!
/jonaz
I agree with Jonaz regarding the colors - yellow should definitely not be low. Like it or not, red, yellow, and green carry baggage. Red means urgent, yellow means caution, green means go. To mess with those will always cause confusion. Probably the best thing to do is change your yellow to green, and your blue to yellow. But since doing this will cause rework for your user base, the simplest thing to do is change yellow to green. Thus, Red, Blue, Green.
By the way, I think it would be cool to allow premium members to pick their own colors for the priorities. Just a thought to help you entice more paying customers.
Привет.
Продаю персональный сертификат WebMoney за $99.
Можете проверить: WMID 322973398779 Redfern
Всё чисто, не одной жалоб. Сделан на утерянные документы. Всё законно.
Если нужно, то есть сертификаты ещё.
Стучацо в личную почту на Вебмани.
Это не спам. Не пишите на мой WMID жалобы в арбитраж Вебмани.
Привет.
Продаю персональный сертификат WebMoney за $99.
Можете проверить: WMID 322973398779 Redfern
Всё чисто, не одной жалоб. Сделан на утерянные документы. Всё законно.
Если нужно, то есть сертификаты ещё.
Стучацо в личную почту на Вебмани.
Это не спам. Не пишите на мой WMID жалобы в арбитраж Вебмани.
Any way that you can get the Next action on a project to show up on the Dashboard? I don’t want to use dates to get them there. I would be extremely happy (and continue my subcription) if we could get this feature. It’s the one area I’m struggling with to get this system working right for me.
Thanks,
Scott