The Priority is very handy tool for making the daily and weekly GTD reviews much quicker, and for being able to relax in confidence that nothing important is overlooked. This is how I use them:
As a rule, I set all new tasks to Medium. This will mean that I will review them routinely, and as a minimum, as per the GTD common practice - in other words once per day for Next actions, once per week for Someday/Maybe, and I also check the Waiting list once per day.
But if I determine that some tasks actually do not need to be reviewed this often I will change them to Low. In the case of the Next list I will only read through the Low Priority tasks during my weekly review (project by project), and this saves a lot of time in my daily review. I normally keep my Next list sorted by Deadline or Priority (almost the same) during my daily routine review.
But even though I do not review my Low Priority Next actions routinely more than once per week, I usually get to review them more often on an ad hoc basis. They are still fully visible and available for selection on the Next list. Whenever I filter or narrow down or regroup the Next list (by context etc) I will always see these tasks where they belong (by context, project, whatever), and can always select them if the situation is right.
Conversely, if I am in danger of being late with something important I mark them as High Priority. This will show them at the top of the Next list. Even in those cases where I choose not to star these tasks right now I can still have complete confidence that I will see them next time I visit my Next list, maybe a few hours later or the next day.
Of course, I try not to have any red High Priority actions at all - because if they really are important I try my best to do them asap and have some safety margin - but once in a while things just pile up, and in those situations it is really comforting to know that there is no risk that I will overlook these tasks. (I may not want to star all of them immediately if there are too many of them, so being able to see them all in red at the top of the Next list is great.)
@ Folke
I take a similar approach in my e-mail client at work (lotus notes based). A fair amount of actions and follow up in my daily work is done through e-mail. I give priority follow up flags to the sent mails which allow me to check responses on a regular basis: daily for the high priority, weekly for the normal, etc.
Within Doit I´ve tested the use of priorities as well, with a different goal: I was looking for a way to order tasks within a project by giving the next task a normal priority and tasks that could not be performed yet priority "none". It didn´t work well ... I now put these in "someday" as a workaround. Nirvana seems to have this better covered with manual ordering or by using the "later" box.
I take a similar approach in my e-mail client at work (lotus notes based). A fair amount of actions and follow up in my daily work is done through e-mail. I give priority follow up flags to the sent mails which allow me to check responses on a regular basis: daily for the high priority, weekly for the normal, etc.
Within Doit I´ve tested the use of priorities as well, with a different goal: I was looking for a way to order tasks within a project by giving the next task a normal priority and tasks that could not be performed yet priority "none". It didn´t work well ... I now put these in "someday" as a workaround. Nirvana seems to have this better covered with manual ordering or by using the "later" box.
