Interesting idea, the only thing I can think of adding is maybe add tagging to the system. In the case of your media: eg, if you feel like watching Sci-Fi you can run a search to retrieve some of the highest recommendations from your backlog. Of those you may have results that come back with anime, Western, and foreign live-action results. If there’s a specific type of show you want you could then add that tag to your results (anime+sci-fi) to get a more precise list of recommendations.
Tagging could be both top-level (as above, picking Sci-Fi doesn’t infer that it must be anime) or hierarchical. I could think of something like programming. You have a set of different programming projects that you would like to work on, however they may require different libraries or languages to work (golang, jscript, R; or Tensorflow, Node.js). You could tag them as resources necessary to complete high-level projects. Using an ELO-scoring system you could compare projects to get a rough estimate of what should be done, followed by running similar scoring on the child tags to determine either the order to read, practice skills or tasks to complete. If your work tasks are separate from your read tasks, then this might offer an extra benefit by showing you articles/reference material that is applicable to (estimated) upcoming or current projects.
Top-level tags might add a constant increase to ELO scores of subtags, however if some subtags start to outperform other subtags in differing parent tags, the system might reorganize your projects to highlight ones you would prefer to focus on. If it keeps track of tasks done it may also force you to handle tasks that while low ELO by themselves are necessary to complete a nearly finished project.
One problem might be chaining tasks, where (an estimated) preferred task exists behind a less desirable task. That might cause a hit to ELO even if it would be better in the long-run to finish the detestable task. Maybe using the higher ELO task could provide a carrot (You could be working on this in only x hours!) to try to push past the block. This kind of structure might be able to solve some Hal’s lightbulb problems as well.
I’m assuming that the system would give you a choice of activities (say 5), rather than just telling you what you should do. The choices you make could then reinforce the ratings of one activity over others. If you wanted to go all-out, you could probably graph this information to see what your preferences actually are and may show what sort of jobs you naturally avoid in your projects. Use weekly check-ins to help determine where new projects or resources should map into your planning, possibly with an artificially higher ELO for a short period (to simulate excitement/motivation).
Some disjointed ideas that came to mind, first blush. They might not work as I’m imagining, or they may add too much complexity to the system to be useful. This does remind me a bit of a SCRUM-like system as well.
Question, if you know. What’s the Jordanian construction sector like? While building a pipeline may only weakly protect the jobs of the Amman farmers, are local companies/contractors involved in the pipeline’s construction?
Does the pipeline go to any other areas which may be exploitable in the future? Do you know what the relations were like with the Southern Desert families? This could be an attempt to push out a faction and install another.