Comment 3 for bug 313695

Hi Lionel! I've also had a few false starts with Chandler in the past. It does have a few nice features which it would be good to see in GTG though. Let me explain the Triage Status thing a little more...

Functionally, triage status (I'm just going to call it status) would work in the same way as priority. It is a ranked sequence which is applied to your tasks. The terms are different though. With status, instead of having a sequence that goes 'High', 'Medium', Low', you have a list that goes something like 'Now', 'Soon, 'Later', 'Done' (Chandler uses 'Now', 'Later', 'Done'). You'd probably have a column in the tasks pane which would contain the status, and which you'd use to sort your tasks (you can see this in Chander).

The main difference between status and priority is in the meanings it communicates and the kinds of work flows it produces. Priority seems essentially reactive. Status is a more proactive way of viewing and organising your tasks. In this sense, status allows use cases that priority does not:
 - A user starts GTG. They want to immediately see the tasks that they are currently working on.
 - A user wants to use GTG to decide which tasks they will work on after they have completed their current tasks.
etc.

One problem with priority which status avoids is that it doesn't map to the sequence in which a user wants to complete their tasks. A high priority task might not need to be done for a long time, for example. ('Due date' is unable to serve this function, imo. Status is categorical - it is an ordinal assignment, not an interval one. Hence it is orientated towards the grouping of tasks. The way I work (and I think most people work), is by focusing on a small number of tasks at any one time, rather than just one. Further, status allows the temporal ordering of tasks which don't have fixed due dates.)