planner-rank.el models Franklin Covey's Urgency and Importance principle. When you think about a task, there are two aspects in consideration: Urgency and Importance. You may want to do the most urgent things first, like answering an email, or you may want to do the most important things first, like reading this manual. Or much better, balance Urgency and Importance and decide what to do.
planner-rank.el can help you balance.
Urgency and Importance are both measured by scores from 0-9. The higher the score, the more you want to do it first. 9 stands for “I should have done this” and 0 stands for “I can forget this”.
If you are using the planner Deadlines feature, the Urgency
score is automatically calculated from how many days are left to meet
the deadline. By default, it will score 9 if the task is overdue and 0
if the deadline is years away. Please refer to the docstring of
planner-rank-deadline-urgency-map-list for detail.
The task rank is calculated from Urgency and Importance scores. As
different people balance urgency and importance differently, a number
of planner-rank-calculate-rank-* functions are provided. The
algorithms vary from a simple average to something like a weighted
root mean square deviation.
The aggressive versions of these functions
(planner-rank-calculate-rank-*-aggressive) will make sure if
one of Urgency and Importance is high, the resulting rank will be high
as well. planner-rank-calculate-rank-weighted-* functions weigh
the Urgency and Important scores depending on
planner-rank-importance-vs-urgency-factor.
Call planner-rank-test-algorithm on each of the functions and
check the result tables to see which one you like most, and set it to
planner-rank-rank-calculate-function. Alternatively, accept the
defaults and tweak them when you get a better feel for ranking.
Once the Rank is calculated, the Task Priorities will be
automatically reset. If the Rank is greater than or equal to
planner-rank-priority-A-valve, the task priority will be
‘A’, if the Rank is between planner-rank-priority-A-valve
and planner-rank-priority-B-valve, the priority will be ‘B’,
else it will be ‘C’.
After setting the task importance and deadline, you can leave it as is. As the deadline approaches, the task priority will automatically be raised and the task re-colored to catch your eyes.
If you are using planner-sort-tasks (see see Making Files Pretty), you can set planner-sort-tasks-key-function to one of
planner-sort-tasks-by-rank,
planner-sort-tasks-by-importance, and
planner-sort-tasks-by-urgency.
Tasks with rank greater than or equal to this value will be set to priority ‘A’.
Tasks with rank greater than or equal to this value and less than
planner-rank-priority-A-valvewill be set to priority ‘B’. Tasks with rank less than this value will be set to priority ‘C’.
Defines how to calculate the Urgency score according to how many days are left to meet the deadline.
How much do you think importance is more “important” than urgency. This will be used in
planner-rank-calculate-rank-weighted-*functions.