I modified this slightly lately: sometimes, there’s one task (task A) that I have a strong desire to do on one dimension, but I have a strong desire on another dimension to do not that. In this case, I can have a hard time making good comparisons- once I get to task A, I highlight it, then every comparison afterwards becomes very hard- in one way I would like to do task A, but in another way, I’d rather do the other thing. Since I do a similar comparison multiple times, comparing task A to several other tasks that have a cloudy preference, this puts me at high risk (double jeopardy) of accidentally marking another task at some point as higher-priority, even though task A might have been the better choice.
To avoid this, and to reduce the number of difficult comparisons, once I identify a task that feels high-priority along some dimension, I will use a new marking to highlight task A, then restart the process starting with the next two items. I will then ignore the extra-marked task (task A) until I’ve gotten all the way through the list, then compare the final result of the second half against task A, meaning I only have to make the hard comparison once, both saving mental effort, and reducing the chance of accidentally skipping the most important task.
Yeah, I can imagine this being useful. One does sometimes encounter cases where unclear preferences lead to accidentally skipping endorsedly-best tasks.
I modified this slightly lately: sometimes, there’s one task (task A) that I have a strong desire to do on one dimension, but I have a strong desire on another dimension to do not that. In this case, I can have a hard time making good comparisons- once I get to task A, I highlight it, then every comparison afterwards becomes very hard- in one way I would like to do task A, but in another way, I’d rather do the other thing. Since I do a similar comparison multiple times, comparing task A to several other tasks that have a cloudy preference, this puts me at high risk (double jeopardy) of accidentally marking another task at some point as higher-priority, even though task A might have been the better choice.
To avoid this, and to reduce the number of difficult comparisons, once I identify a task that feels high-priority along some dimension, I will use a new marking to highlight task A, then restart the process starting with the next two items. I will then ignore the extra-marked task (task A) until I’ve gotten all the way through the list, then compare the final result of the second half against task A, meaning I only have to make the hard comparison once, both saving mental effort, and reducing the chance of accidentally skipping the most important task.
Yeah, I can imagine this being useful. One does sometimes encounter cases where unclear preferences lead to accidentally skipping endorsedly-best tasks.