Doing the work
Priorities and Some Day
What the five levels mean, and where Some Day work goes so it neither nags you nor gets lost.
Every task has a priority. There is no "unset" — a task you never think about is Medium, which is what "I didn't say" should mean. That one decision is why every list in sjTasks sorts sensibly without anyone having to tidy up first.
The five levels
| Level | Use it for | How it looks |
|---|---|---|
| Urgent | Drop what you are doing | Solid red with the word Urgent. The only place the brand colour is used as a signal, which is why nothing else on the row shouts |
| High | Next, and soon | Amber |
| Medium | Normal work. The default | Plain grey |
| Low | Worth doing, nobody is waiting | Pale blue |
| Some Day | Maybe one day | The faintest thing on the page: grey, dashed outline |
Set it when you create a task with !high, from the priority menu on the task itself, or from
the priority cell straight in the Tasks table and on a project page — no need to open the task.
To change a lot of them at once, tick the rows on the Tasks table and use Set priority
(Finding things).
Priority belongs to tasks, not projects. A project that matters more is a project whose tasks are prioritised. If you want projects in a particular order, order them by hand or by name.
Some Day is a priority, not a hiding place
Some Day is real, open work. That has three consequences worth being explicit about, because getting this wrong is how a backlog turns into a graveyard:
- It counts as open. "Open tasks in Acme" includes Some Day work, because it is open. Having two meanings for open would be worse than seeing an extra row.
- It sinks. Some Day sorts to the bottom of every list, and the dashboard leaves it out by default — behind a switch you can see and click, never a silent rule.
- It can still be late. Give a Some Day task a due date and it goes overdue when that date passes, like anything else. Adding a date is how you promote something without touching its priority.
How to actually use it
Some Day is for the ideas you do not want to lose and do not want to see every morning: "we should rewrite the onboarding email", "ask about their analytics". Put them in, let them sink, and look at the list once a week. A parked idea that nobody ever reviews is the same as a deleted one, only slower.
Some Day backlog is one of the standard questions on your dashboard, so this costs one click. Give it five minutes on a Friday: promote the two that matter, leave the rest.
What priority does not do
Priority does not change dates and does not reorder work automatically. It is a shared word for how much something matters, so that a sorted list means the same thing to you and to the person you sent it to. Changing it is an edit like any other, so the people watching the task see it on the bell — nobody is emailed about it.
Changing a priority is recorded in the task's history — who changed it, from what, to what, and when.