Urgency
By default, Tasks sorts query results by decreasing urgency. Tasks tries to calculate urgency based on what you should likely work on next.
The urgency score isn’t perfect, of course, as many more factors may influence the order on which you want to work on tasks. Urgency can only consider the parameters it knows: dates and priorities. It is likely that the task you want to work on next is one of the tasks at the top of the list.
The idea of Tasks’ urgency is based on Taskwarrior’s concept of urgency.
How Urgency is Calculated
Urgency is a numeric score that Tasks calculates for each task. Tasks simply sums up urgency scores of different aspects of a task:
- Due date
- Priority
- Scheduled date
- Start date
As you can tell from the table below, due dates have the strongest influence on urgency.
The scores are as follows:
| Property | Score | |
|---|---|---|
| Due | More than 7 days overdue | 12.0 |
| Due between 7 days ago and in 14 days | Range of 12.0 to 0.2 | |
Example for "today": 9.0 | ||
| More than 14 days until due | 0.2 | |
| None | 0.0 | |
| Priority | High | 6.0 |
| Medium | 3.9 | |
| None | 1.95 | |
| Low | 0.0 | |
| Scheduled | Today or earlier | 5.0 |
| Tomorrow or later | 0.0 | |
| None | 0.0 | |
| Starts | Today or earlier | 0.0 |
| Tomorrow or later | -3.0 | |
| None | 0.0 | |
Examples
A task that is due today, has a "medium" priority, is not scheduled, and has no start date:
urgency = 9.0 + 3.9 + 0.0 + 0.0 = 12.9
A task that has no due date, a "high" priority, is scheduled for yesterday, and started yesterday:
urgency = 0.0 + 6.0 + 5.0 + 0.0 = 11.0
A task that has no due date, a "high" priority, is scheduled for tomorrow, and starts tomorrow:
urgency = 0.0 + 6.0 + 0.0 - 3.0 = 3.0