Shifting priorities

We all deal with priorities every day, your task view or Jira board, invites you to categorize all items into low, medium or high priority. What Jira got wrong ist the introduction of "priority urgent" as a result of folding the two-dimensional Eisenhower method into a dropdown list.

The challenge with "must fit in a dropdown" is that classifying task priority is only a prelude, a clarification, a segmentation of what we actually do, explicit or implicit:

Priorities are not classified, they are ranked

You followed Ike and ended up with 20 tasks that are equally important and urgent. Equally? Nope. We all rank them using whatever additional properties we have at hand in our plan of execution.

Of course no plan survives first contact with reality, so our priorities shift, we re-rank the list.

To illustrate this I needed some visuals, despite my two left hands when it comes to graphic design. So I commissioned an app for that, some would say vibe coded it. It allows me:

• run individual sessions for different topics
• enter topics and assign colors
• create a ranking with drag & drop
• create another ranking, a different point in time or another person
• compare them including presentation mode

Go play with it or modify it to your liking. Runs in a browser, no server backend. Optional: back it up into an Apache CouchDB.

As usual YMMV