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Using AAP Priorities to Decide What to do First

However, as was mentioned in previous lesson, in real life small difference between planned and actual time spend to an activity is common and natural. It means that you should not put attention to small differences in priorities and their small deviations from normal value. The real question is how high should be a priority to deserve you attention and what difference between priorities can be consider as significant.

In order that you could quickly determine what activities deserve special attention and to what extent, AAP uses colors. Look, please, at the sample image of Priority Panel below (to show more realistic image with more activities we use example that is different from one in the previous lessons)
Pale red color (Jogging in the sample image) corresponds to habitually neglected activities that certainty deserve consideration why it is so. Below is the list of possible responses depending on the reason of the negligence. The meaning of other colors is described below this list.

• It might happen that the reason why you spent small or no time for an activity is temporal and well justified. For example it may happen that you had long holidays and no chance or intention to work during them. In such circumstances you can
  • just resume input spent time for the work after the vacations. Due to the forgetting feature of AAP the priority for work gradually reach normal level.
  • You might prefer after the vacations to start from normal priority value. To do so first set Active Day to yesterday if it has not been set for this date earlier(see previous lesson ). Then open Activity Item Info dialog for activity work to find out how many hours remains to be spent for this activity. Input this value in Hours Spent in... column as described in previous lesson
• Developing further the above holidays example, it might happen that though you spent sufficient time for an activity you had no your computer with you and had not input spent hours. If it is so, you might prefer to enter these hours switching Active Day to dates when you actually spent them as described in previous lesson. As was explained in this lesson you need not to be very precise and can input approximate values. Moreover, it is not necessary to remember exact day when you spent time for an activity. You can input all time spent in a week for one Active Day in this week (no matter which). In AAP the first day of a week is Sunday and the last is Saturday.
• If an activity remains in the red zone several weeks without obvious and justified reason and all your efforts to spend enough time for this activity fail it might happen that you set too large time part for this activity. You may use Statistics Sheet of Activity Item Info Dialog box to find how much time you spent on average for the neglected activity to set more realistic time part.

Let us describe now the meaning of the remaining colors in the above image. Orange activities (Exercises in the sample image) are in the danger zone. They are neglected and deserve more regular or lengthy attention.

The priorities of the "white" activities are higher than ideal but the deviation lies in the limits of natural fluctuations mentioned at the beginning of the lesson. Usually no special attention is needed for white priorities. The white color should be especially considered as normal if you input spent hours in the morning of the next day because in this case even if you spend time strictly according to the plan the color of the activity will be white because you simply have not had enough time for the activities of the present day in the mourning.

The green color means that time spent for such activities is greater or equal than plan.

As for the question what the difference between the priorities can be considered as significant, we may say that if the difference is less than 10 it should not be taken into account very seriously because it lies in the limits of natural fluctuations or deviations.

The orange color corresponds approximately to the activities, to which no time was spent during about a week or more. Red color approximately corresponds to activities which spent time is less than 1/10 of plan. Green color corresponds to activities, which spent time was more or equal to planned time. 10 points roughly correspond to 20% difference in their time to plan value.

Now you know enough to use AAP results for the decision what to do first. Of course, in the real life the AAP priorities is not and should not be the only factor that you consider before making the final decision about what to do first. We believe however that the AAP priorities are an important factor. In the real life people tend to spend too much time for the activities that they like and forget about the activities that they do not like. It could become dangerous. AAP warns you about this danger in advance and reminds about the neglected activities. It gives you the chance to correct your behavior. We hope that AAP will help you balance your life and increases the probability that it will be happy and successful.

In this lesson we have explained how to use priority to make decision but we did not give the definition of priority. Short qualitative definition of the priority is given in glossary. The mathematical definition of priority is given in Technical Details. This mathematical definition requires some mathematical background to understand it. But probably all what you need is to check whether AAP priorities behave in accordance with common sense. Therefore in the next lesson we describe several "experiments" that you can perform to be sure that priorities behaves as one should expect of priorities or in other words that the definition and implementation of priorities is in accordance with common sense. Although this next lesson gives you some new knowledge e.g. about how to use samples it is actually optional. You can skip it at first reading and return to it later.

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