fsavard: Yep, I thought of a story as being a tree with nodes that can be rated by users. The top rated sequence of nodes will form an official story line, with people being able to see all the tree.

psytek: Perhaps moderator/author of a story will be able to select the number.

But why do it now? Nothing. I'll do the first task where the risk of not doing something exceeds 50%.

ftfm.

God (by which I mean gods of this website) I wish I could edit my shameful English in the submission.

Well, I'll refer to example above.

Let's say I'm limited to four hours per day where I can be productive. We see that a paper takes six hours but it's also located right after exam. If Iwill study for test on the day before test and then take test on the day before the paper, Iwon't have time for a paper. The more hours of work I packed into that two day back-to-back season, the greater the probability is that the task which has the latest deadline will not get done.

This is a backbone of risk-minimizing algorithm I plan to use. It stands on the following principle: User can accurately predict how much it will take him to do a certain task; there will be no risks involved other than risk of running out of time.

But this is only true in a perfect world. For real world we'll have to analyze user's time estimate vs time spent. Something Joel Spolsky calls velocity.

It would also be kind of cool to base velocity from todo item titles. Let's say "packing a backpack" is a different type of activity from "preparing for a test" and should have different velocities from the database.

Here's what user will absolutely have to enter for this system to work though: - Title of todo item - Deadline - Expected hours - Actual hours

I'm not sure now if I, or anyone else, can be expected to enter as much as four items for every single todo item. what's more horrible is that user would actually have to understand how much time they spent on that fourth item.

But basically, it's FogBugz-style evidence-based system adopted for usual users which distinguishes between different types of tasks.

Discarding probabilities for a moment, you have some amount of time in which to do work, and some tasks to accomplish during that time.

Yes. Yes.

The basic question is -- how should I allocate the time to accomplish these tasks?

No. The question is -- how to do everything timely? I presume you have the time to do everything but you don't know which task to do right now because you have so many of them.

I don't understand why risk is involved here -- why can't we just treat it as some amount of time in which to do a certain amount of work, without any sort of uncertainty?

We can't treat as some amount of time with some amount of tasks because: a) We usually don't know how long the task is going to take. b) We don't usually consider the fact that if we do each task right before its deadline we'll end up with a bunch of hard tasks near other.

We'll have something like this:

Monday: 2 hours on A + 6 hours on B + 4 hours on C + 2 hours on D Tuesday: 3 hours on E + 9 hours on F

The problem is that F will usually suffer the most damage and risks the most not being done or, most likely, not being done properly.

It is probably a good idea that not being done properly or can equal not being done. I want all the tasks to be done at a peak of mental productivity.

Also: we don't actually know that we'll spend 3 hours on E or 6 hours on B. (That's when velocity comes into play).