♥️ 🔭 🦈 Priority task ranking - IL TEMPO app 🤜🏽 ✌🏽 ♦️

Techniques of time management and various systems of accounting for daily tasks interested me from the first days of work in the office. Eisenhower's matrix became a salvation from the quagmire of routine affairs, and at first it saved it from the inefficient use of working time. But, after several months, the number of tasks increased so much that the quadrant technique showed its weaknesses. In order to better consider them, we recall the principle of construction of the Eisenhower Matrix. Two axes: urgency and importance, and 4 quadrants, respectively:

urgent and important
urgent and not important
not urgent and important
not urgent and not important

It is assumed that the person himself will evaluate his tasks according to the criteria of urgency and importance, and then put the results in the appropriate quadrants.

And then, there is a simple instruction: urgent and important tasks are performed independently and immediately, urgent and not important are delegated to someone. Not urgent, but important tasks can be postponed, but they can certainly be done independently, but not urgent and not important tasks are generally equated to a meaningless load - they are recommended to either be postponed indefinitely or mercilessly delegated, in general - not give them any significant value for the work process .

If the urgency of tasks is not very difficult to assess - in the presence or absence of deadlines, then how to assess the importance? Moreover, it is so categorical: it is important and not important. For example, I almost never have non-important tasks - I simply do not set them for myself initially. All tasks are important to one degree or another, and just evaluating this degree is the main difficulty in planning. And when are these tasks 10 pieces in each quadrant? Where to start? And those 10 important, but not urgent, quietly turn into 10 no less important, but already quite urgent to 10 already available! And those 10 urgent, but not important? What is delegated with them? As if each person has a staff of assistants and assistants, ready to take on a heap of his tasks and assignments. Usually it comes down not to delegation - when the control over the implementation is transferred to the authorized person, but to the setting of the task - and,at times, it requires more resources for monitoring the implementation than for an independent decision.

As the experience of many authors shows, including on the GTD Hub - one of the main reasons for procrastination is the presence of equivalent tasks. The internal conflict due to the lack of a clear ranking by priority prevents the efficient use of working time.

Own assessment methodology

I was puzzled by the search for a system that could set the tasks itself priorities, and I should only perform tasks on the list - from top to bottom. Neither ABC analysis, nor Pareto, nor other methods made it possible to remove this load according to the classification of tasks - everywhere a person was required to independently choose the priority of a task.

And I began to classify them myself. By importance, I divided the tasks into 4 types - transparent and accessible. Each task can be easily assigned to one of four categories. When choosing a category, I was guided by the principle from the opposite: not "what leads to the solution of the task," but "what will happen if the task fails and is not completed on time?" So, the degrees of importance:

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This system of task classification by importance significantly facilitated the task distribution process, but did not contribute to the achievement of the main goal - assigning priority to sequential execution. I understood that it was necessary to complicate the process of calculating priority and add new criteria for evaluating tasks.

So, many years ago, my first task ranking system appeared in the form of an Excel tablet. The evaluation criteria were classic parameters:

Importance
Urgency

The importance we have already considered, 4 categories (from 1 to 4). In urgency, I also identified 4 categories with the assignment of each urgency index in increasing order:

Time to complete more than 48 hours
The term for the implementation of 8-48 hours
Duration 2-8 hours
Time to complete less than 2 hours

And now I’ll describe how I tried to calculate this magic index, according to which the tasks themselves should be built with the optimal priority for execution.

At first, in order to get the priority index, I decided to simply summarize the importance and urgency values, but quickly realized that their significance is not equal. A less important, but more urgent task had the same index as a task more important, but less urgent (1 + 4 = 4 + 1). Although, even in terms of quadrants, this is not correct. Obviously, importance has more weight than urgency, so the importance of importance, when calculating priority, needed to be multiplied by an increasing factor.

I tried this system in business for several weeks and got the following result: with a large number of tasks, the conveyor began to stall - small, moderately important and not very urgent tasks accumulated, turned into urgent and systematically expired, since they were permanently at a lower priority compared to more important tasks that are constantly arriving. Violation of terms for such tasks gave a very tangible negative effect on the entire work process. For example: 3 hours spent on a large project did not allow five 2-minute calls for less important projects. And these 5 missed calls, in the end, became a more serious problem than violating the deadline for a major task for 10 minutes.

The system required a new introduction. And I entered the complexity parameter. This is the number of hours required to complete the task. Complexity is an indispensable parameter for calculating priority.

That's just, unlike importance and urgency, the lower the complexity - the higher the priority! Therefore, I did not add the value of the complexity parameter to the sum of the first two variables, but the inverse fraction for this number.

Thus, the introduction of the complexity parameter allowed us not to lose sight of simple tasks that do not require a lot of time to complete. If it takes a couple of minutes to write a letter or a phone call, it’s easier to do it right away, without delay, and only then proceed with resource-intensive and difficult tasks.

For several years, the formula for calculating the priority has changed and modernized many times, overgrown with additional coefficients to optimize the result. For example, the value of urgency began to be calculated by the formula, and not by applying values from 1 to 4 according to the given conditions.

Automation

Each company has some means for planning and controlling everyday tasks. It can be a CRM, a scheduler or an organizer. My wife, for example, begins the working day for many years in a row by writing out tasks on a piece of paper. Someone uses stickers on the monitor, some use commercial or proprietary project management systems, and some use reminders in Outlook. All this, to one degree or another, is useful and even necessary. But, given that my prioritization system was done on the knee in Excel, I had to use several systems at once to work with tasks: one to create a list with ranking by priority, the second to track the status and deadline. Trello, Megaplan and other products, although very functional, have not taken root on my smartphone - the interface is too confused.For scheduling, reminders and tracking, I used standard iOS applications: Reminders, Alarm / Timer, and Calendar. By the way, the calendar surprised me a lot when I looked at it in detail. Many iPhone users do not know that it is also a daily planner for event planning. Of particular interest to me was the functionality of "Travel Time." If you are planning a meeting away - the system calculates the path on foot or by car according to the initial and final geo-locations, and then book this time immediately before the meeting. It will also remind you when it is time to start gathering or it is time to advance to this meeting.that it’s also a diary for planning events. Of particular interest to me was the functionality of "Travel Time." If you are planning a meeting away - the system calculates the path on foot or by car according to the initial and final geo-locations, and then book this time immediately before the meeting. It will also remind you when it is time to start gathering or it is time to advance to this meeting.that it’s also a diary for planning events. Of particular interest to me was the functionality of "Travel Time." If you are planning a meeting away - the system calculates the path on foot or by car according to the initial and final geo-locations, and then book this time immediately before the meeting. It will also remind you when it is time to start gathering or it is time to advance to this meeting.

I thought it would be great to have an application that combined the ability to formulate and rank all tasks, as well as plan meetings and events with reference to a specific time period in the diary, with the calculation of travel time on various types of vehicles taking into account traffic jams . The technical task began to form in my head.

IOS app development for personal use

I wanted the application first for myself. The number of daily tasks exceeded 30, the resources were clearly not enough. When you spend most of the day on the road, sometimes it's already a problem - it's just not to forget to fix the task between telephone conversations on the way from meeting to meeting. It is also difficult to delegate or set tasks to third parties - there was a negative experience. When you transfer not just one, but a group of tasks to a job at once, the new executor usually chooses the simplest and least priority ones for execution, and as a result, the most important ones have to be completed in the “exploit mode” itself. Point setting of the problem solves the problem, but there is no time or tools for this.

I sat down and wrote down what I want from this universal application:

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Event planning in the diary . The ability to calculate and book travel time, a reminder system.

With such wishes, the first version of the Il Tempo application was written , which I offer for testing in combat conditions.

IL TEMPO V1.2

The first version is very simple, but it performs the function every day. Firstly, I stopped missing the moment of fixing the task - it takes several seconds to start a task in Tempo. And secondly, the torment of choosing a task to perform has disappeared - I click on the top without looking and take to work!

The program interface is divided into two windows:

Organizer . This is the place where all tasks that do not have a clear link to the execution time fall down. They have a priority of execution, calculated by the program automatically.

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When adding a task to the Organizer, you must specify the deadline for execution, select the degree of importance of the task from the list of options, and determine the estimated time required to complete it.

By the way, the complexity parameter is the only one you have to think about. It requires an objective assessment of their own capabilities and available resources to accomplish the task. But even if you systematically miss this parameter, it doesn’t matter, you can use the task archive for calibration.

The archive shows the real time spent on execution - so you can understand why you are more inclined to: overestimate or belittle your capabilities.

Tasks can be taken to work, completed and edited. All parameters can be changed, including importance.

In the work, you can take several tasks at once, if required. All tasks in the work are at the top of the list and are marked with a triangle icon.

Adding an event to the Diary occurs the same way as in the regular calendar.

Start time, end time, travel time if necessary. If the travel time is known (proven route) - select a digital value from the list. If it is not known, then you will need to indicate the geolocation of the beginning and end of the path to calculate the time spent on the road on foot or by car.

Functional development plan in the second version of the program

Real-world operation helps identify needs for the new Il Tempo application functionality .

At the moment, we add a new parameter to the organizer - "Time to start execution". Why is it needed? Example: there is a task - a call to a client will take a couple of minutes. Given the high importance and low complexity of the task, there is every chance of getting into the top priority tasks. But there is a condition - the client asked to call no earlier than 3 days later. And all these 3 days the task will hang at the top of the list, at first with a huge number of hours before the deadline. Completing it is not right, taking it to work is also impossible. It remains to ignore and wait for the designated time, but this is not very convenient. The “Start time for execution” parameter allows tinting tasks that have not reached this deadline with gray color and remove them from the priority rating down the list exactly until the start time for the execution of the task.

We are also thinking about the implementation of the functional “Workday”. This parameter will help to solve two ideas at once:

Take into account the time planned for events in the diary, in calculating the employment of tasks from the organizer.
Calculate tasks that are obviously doomed to failure by the deadlines.

How is it planned to apply it?

You indicate in the application settings the period of your activity on tasks from the organizer - say 9:00 - 19:00. Thus, the program knows that you have 10 hours a day to complete tasks from the organizer. From this free time you should subtract the time spent on the planned events - we get the information from the daily log. We get a certain amount of free hours, but with reference to specific dates and time intervals.

There is a list of tasks arranged by priority. Everyone knows the complexity and urgency. Adding sequentially the complexity of all the tasks, the system will fill all the free time in this way if you would execute them in turn as a conveyor. As a result of the calculations, a situation is permissible when the deadline for a task arrives earlier than you can start it, given the accumulated tasks, events, and working day restrictions.

Such notorious “corpses” need to be tracked in real time and highlight such tasks with color. This will allow, without waiting for a failure, to delegate the task at an earlier date.

The appearance of such tasks is inevitable if there is more work than you can do. And this functionality will allow you to more competently plan resources and predict congestion.

We also plan to make database storage in the cloud, synchronization, web access and authorization.

Well, the logical step is to release the version for Android .

In conclusion

Who will download and test the application in combat conditions on real tasks - please give feedback.

I also ask you to share your opinion in the comments and participate in the polls.

Thank you for the attention!