Re:Show HN: Baller ToDo – a no-list todo app
by educated_idiot on Sunday November 08, 2020 @04:44AM
(#25024458)
Yep, IIUC what you are talking about is similar to the question others have raised about an "Effort" dimension.
To keep the daily or slightly more long term planning simple, I opted to not consider those dimensions. You raise a good point and I need to give it some thought. It has to be "complete" enough that you can prioritize properly, but easy enough that you can use it all the time.
The finance example is a good one, but I think you could boil all the costs down to a single term for that case. (essentially it's just money lost). Just like the user makes a choice there, the expectation here is that the user will formulate an impact-effort code in their mind and add a task.
Re:Show HN: Baller ToDo – a no-list todo app
by kingofpandora on Sunday November 08, 2020 @07:18AM
(#25025291)
How about offering, say, three effort options, reflected in the size of the circle in the matrix?
First, task impact per unit of effort is technically a better measure of how worthwhile it is to complete the task than absolute task impact is.
Second, I recall some writing in the personal-finance genre which said that people often make more progress getting out of debt by paying their debts in order from small to large, ignoring the interest rate. This is more expensive than paying debts in order of high to low interest rate, but it may give you more of a feeling of progress when one of your debts disappears, even though that debt wasn't, in reality, causing much of a problem. By the time you get to more difficult debts, you're on a roll.
This suggests that there is probably a place for configuring the priority scheme; absolute impact, impact per unit effort, and absolute effort are all reasonable choices.