Apples Bananas and Pears: Why prioritised lists break when filters and groupings are added.

Link allows you to prioritize your work

Being able to prioritize your work seems like not a big ask. This provides team members the flexibility to work on what they want with the structure needed to focus their efforts on a work list they can achieve.

Prioritizable workflow lists are rare/non-existent in workflow apps. This is because the logic that sits behind them is so complex most apps give up.

Why do filters break prioritized lists?

Here is why filters and groupings break the logic behind prioritization:

Apples > Pears (you like Apples more than Pears) Pears > Bananas (you like Pears more than Bananas) If there are no Apples (because you have filtered them out), and you decide you like Bananas more than Pears, does it make it them better than Apples? It’s not possible to say because your new preferences (priorities) exist in a filtered context. If there are Apples and you put Bananas > Pears but Apples > Bananas then we know where Bananas belong is your fruit salad preferences. The same unsolvable logic problem occurs with groupings: if I group all my Apples, Pears and Bananas together and decide one Banana is going to be eaten before another Banana, does it mean it's going to be eaten before any of the Apples?

This is why filters and groupings break prioritizable lists and a snippet of one of the reasons why no workflow apps provide prioritizable lists in workflow (it’s hard).