Merry Christmas! Time to organize my Taskwarrior tasks.
My more focused approach to Taskwarrior is working well. I add a task when I get an idea, and mark it done sometime after I finish. Annotations let me add noteworthy details. Tags and projects help both for organizing tasks and describing them. A task bubbles up to the top of task next as I add more information to it.
That bubbling behavior gets in the way sometimes.
I created some tasks for playing with my Fitbit data and added relevant annotations. Taskwarrior follows a rule of “it must be important if you’re talking so much about it,”" and dutifully puts those tasks high on the list.
Thing is, right now I care more about fixing my music library. Long story, but the moral of that tale is be careful with Beets and the Duplicates plugin. I have slightly different versions of the library on each of my machines, and a backup with all of the music but none of the Beets import information. I could make a project out of it, but it’s more of a thing I poke at when I can.
Anyways — I want my next report to more closely resemble my current priorities. I can do that by manually setting Priority for each of my tasks.
Task priority
Priority can be added to any task as an attribute, using priority: followed by the Priority you wish to assign. Priority also works as a filter for your reports.
The default choices are H, M, L, and none at all — to remove a Priority.
Looking at the first few entries of next shows me the effect of setting Priority.
I see a new column reflecting that I now describe some tasks with Priority. Over on the end, Urgency jumps for tasks with any Priority at all. H Priority tasks get a large boost. But what do these Priority values mean?
Priority means something different for everyone. The basic idea is the higher a task’s Priority is, the more important it is to me.
Here’s how I use Priority values for now.
Priority
Represents
Description
H
High
I am — or want to be — working on it right now.
M
Medium
I want to work on this soon.
L
Low
I want to work on this eventually.
empty
None
I haven’t thought about it.
My usage will change as I learn more about Taskwarrior but this works.
I don’t need to think too much about priority when I’m just adding to the idea bucket. Probably a good idea to periodically review unprioritized tasks and assign a Priority or delete them if they won’t ever be worth my time.
Give me a minute while I assign priorities.
I could have added due date information to the library task rather than an annotation, but I’m sticking with this approach of a few features at a time. Otherwise I’ll try to learn everything at one sitting, get overwhelmed and distracted, then abandon the whole thing.
That said, it looks like next I should learn dates in Taskwarrior.