I have seen dozens and dozens of threads by now where users are angry about the replacement of the previous priority based secondary sorting of all list groups. And most users wrongly blame the manual sorting as such.

The error made by Doit was not to introduce manual sorting, but to forget two important little details:

1) On the night before Dec 22, they should have pre-initialized all user's new manual sorting orders to coincide with the previous priority sorting. This was not done. Everything appeared in some totally random order which shocked us all. This then needed to be "repaired" somehow, and many of us probably have already done so by manually rearranging our tasks by priority. But maybe Doit should also offer a once-off tool for this purpose for those users who have not already done so?

2) Even if you have manual sorting, which is indeed a very powerful and useful feature, which we all should appreciate, there must be an intelligent DEFAULT principle in place for where new tasks are initially placed. Doit had forgotten to put such an algorithm into place. New tasks were placed randomly on the lists, and you always have to rearrange them manually. This is no good. The initial placement must be clever and useful, such that most people do not necessarily have to drag anything at all unless they really want to.

Since priority sorting was so very popular (and I liked it very much, too) I suggest that tasks should be initially placed by priority.

In this way, people who want automatic priority sorting within list groups will have exactly that. And those who wish to reorder the tasks manually are free to do so to the extent they like. I think this would be a very simple and great solution for everybody!

The principle is simple: Whenever a new task is created (or moved into) a box or context etc that has a manual order implemented, the new tasks should be placed immediately before the first task that has the same priority. This will work for everybody. For those who already have everything else by priority, this new task will join the other tasks of that priority, at the top of that priority stratum where it is easy to see. For those that have everything manually sorted in some totally different way than priority there will at least be a crystal clear principle for where the tasks land, and people can drag it on from there according to whatever philosophy they have.

Personally I would rely mainly on the automatic placement but quite often fine-tune the position of the tasks within each priority stratum.

http://help.doit.im/topics/2600