Decision-Making Algorithm for Assisted Prioritization?

I sometimes make a long list of tasks and then need to sort them in order of importance. This is a time consuming and cognitively effortful task. Has Asana ever considered incorporating some sort of decision-making software that uses comparative analysis and sorting algorithms (I’m thinking a form of batched merge sort may be best) to make this easier? I found something that does something like this (using quick sort) but it could be improved and isn’t easy to integrate into asana. A human-driven sort algorithm (MonkeySort) | Projects | Opinions, tips and case studies by systems architect Leonid Shevtsov

I also think something like this could be incorporated: MindTools | Home

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This is a very interesting idea and I added my vote. Wonder if it can be converted into a chrome extension.

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@Adam_Yormark,

Long-term I think Asana’s vision video suggests using machine learning to help with things like this.

Nearer-term, and not to take away from your feedback but just to offer immediate workarounds:

1 The Action Priority Matrix article you posted mentions the similar Eisenhower Urgency/Importance Matrix. This can be generated now from Asana using my Asana2Go extension (either based on tags or a custom field as you prefer).

Not only that, it would be trivial to make a custom report format based off of this to exactly depict the Action Priority Matrix itself in a format as shown below.

The existing Eisenhower Matrix output is:

2 Re the Monkey Sort from the first algorithm, I realize I perform this manually quite often and I kind of do the repeated binary tests as shown in the article’s demo page right in My Tasks just going from the top of my list of newly-auto-promoted or assigned tasks until I reach the bottom, and dragging and dropping as I go; not much slower than the tool would be I think!

Thanks,

Larry

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Thanks for showing me the Eisenhower Matrix extension! I’ll try that out and see how it works. :slight_smile:

As far as performing binary testing manually by “going from the top of [the] list of newly-auto-promoted or assigned tasks until [you] reach the bottom” This is something like what I do as well, but this is actually a much less efficient algorithm than what I’m proposing! This is something akin to Bubble sort, which requires making a lot more binary comparisons before the list becomes fully sorted (which means more mental effort). There are other, more effective sorting algorithms which use sneaky algorithmic trickery to make the ranking process happen both faster and with less mental effort. These algorithms have mostly been used to make computers faster and more efficient, but as far as I can tell haven’t been transferred to human-powered ranking systems yet.

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Interesting idea, that can be developed as a third-party tool!

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Hi @Adam_Yormark
Prioritization in Asana is a bit complicated. As for the third-party tools, I would recommend you try Ducalis, it has two-way sync with Asana.

  1. Create a filter for Asana tasks in Ducalis, and all new tasks by that filter will always automatically appear in Ducalis.

  2. Evaluate your tasks with whatever criteria you need. Then you can see your priorities in a form of a list or a 2x2 matrix in Ducalis and send the priority ranking to Asana custom fields.

Here you can read more about how that works.

Don’t forget to mention you work there @Natasha_Beseda =)

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