Grounded Task Prioritization with Context-Aware Sequential Ranking

People rely on task management applications and digital assistants to capture and track their tasks, and help with executing them. The burden of organizing and scheduling time for tasks continues to reside with users of these systems, despite the high cognitive load associated with these activities. Users stand to benefit greatly from a task management system capable of prioritizing their pending tasks, thus saving them time and effort. In this article, we make three main contributions. First, we propose the problem of task prioritization, formulating it as a ranking over a user’s pending tasks given a history of previous interactions with a task management system. Second, we perform an extensive analysis on the large-scale anonymized, de-identified logs of a popular task management application, deriving a dataset of grounded, real-world tasks from which to learn and evaluate our proposed system. We also identify patterns in how people record tasks as complete, which vary consistently with the nature of the task. Third, we propose a novel contextual deep learning solution capable of performing personalized task prioritization. In a battery of tests, we show that this approach outperforms several operational baselines and other sequential ranking models from previous work. Our findings have implications for understanding the ways people prioritize and manage tasks with digital tools, and in the design of support for users of task management applications.

Principals’ Priorities and Values – Twenty-five Years of Compulsory School Principalship in Iceland

This paper reports on a study of compulsory school principals conducted in 2017. It focuses on principals’ values, both ethical and management related, and their actual and desirable prioritization of important tasks. Data was gathered with a questionnaire which was sent to all Icelandic school principals, 162 individuals in total. The response rate was 69%. The findings show that 94% of the principals say they highly emphasize the ethical values care, equality, democracy, autonomy, tolerance and justice. These ethical values, however, do not seem to impact task prioritization. This indicates that the principals may not have a clear picture of their own value base in the way that scholars have advocated for. The emphasis the principals place on management related values is more variable. It is therefore uncertain to what extent values guide them in their everyday practice.

Young adults with recurrent low back pain demonstrate altered trunk coordination during gait independent of pain status and attentional demands

Pain influences both attention and motor behavior. We used a dual-task interference paradigm to investigate 1) alterations in attentional performance, 2) the ability to switch task prioritization, and 3) the effect of attentional demand on trunk coordination during narrow-based walking in and out of a painful episode in individuals with recurrent low back pain (LBP). We tested twenty young adults with LBP both in and out of a painful episode and compared them to twenty matched back-healthy individuals. Participants simultaneously performed a narrow step width matching task and an arithmetic task, with and without instructions to prioritize either task. A motion capture system was used to record kinematic data, and frontal plane trunk coordination was analyzed using vector coding on the thorax and pelvis angles. Single task performance, dual-task effect, dual-task performance variability, task prioritization switch, and trunk coordination were analyzed using paired t-tests or repeated measures two-way ANOVAs. Results indicated that active pain has a detrimental effect on attentional processes, indicated by poorer single task performance and increased dual-task performance variability for individuals with recurrent LBP. Individuals with LBP, regardless of pain status, were able to switch task prioritization to a similar degree as their back-healthy counterparts. Compared to the control group, individuals with recurrent LBP exhibited a less in-phase, more pelvis-dominated trunk coordination during narrow-based walking, independent of pain status and regardless of attentional manipulations. Thus, altered trunk coordination in persons with LBP appears to be habitual, automatic, and persists beyond symptom duration.

Two sources of task prioritization: The interplay of effector-based and task order-based capacity allocation in the PRP paradigm

When processing of two tasks overlaps, performance is known to suffer. In the well-established psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, tasks are triggered by two stimuli with a short temporal delay (stimulus onset asynchrony; SOA), thereby allowing control of the degree of task overlap. A decrease of the SOA reliably yields longer RTs of the task associated with the second stimulus (Task 2) while performance in the other task (Task 1) remains largely unaffected. This Task 2-specific SOA effect is usually interpreted in terms of central capacity limitations. Particularly, it has been assumed that response selection in Task 2 is delayed due to the allocation of less capacity until this process has been completed in Task 1. Recently, another important factor determining task prioritization has been proposed—namely, the particular effector systems associated with tasks. Here, we study both sources of task prioritization simultaneously by systematically combining three different effector systems (pairwise combinations of oculomotor, vocal, and manual responses) in the PRP paradigm. Specifically, we asked whether task order-based task prioritization (SOA effect) is modulated as a function of Task 2 effector system. The results indicate a modulation of SOA effects when the same (oculomotor) Task 1 is combined with a vocal versus a manual Task 2. This is incompatible with the assumption that SOA effects are solely determined by Task 1 response selection duration. Instead, they support the view that dual-task processing bottlenecks are resolved by establishing a capacity allocation scheme fed by multiple input factors, including attentional weights associated with particular effector systems.

Task prioritization methods in flexible software development methodologies

The modern task prioritization methods that are used in flexible software development methodologies are discussed in the paper. Very flexible development methodologies such as Scrum, Kunban and others are currently the most popular because they allow making adjustments to it at any stage of a project, to improve the quality of the created product through daily monitoring of its creation and quickly release the first versions of the software. All task prioritization methods that are used in software projects de-velopment including flexible methodologies are divided into those that take into account the point of view of the development team and those that are based on various quantitative assessments, among which various metrics, expert opinions, points of view of those who are interested in the project, availa-ble classifications etc. Among the considered prioritization methods, which take into account the opin-ion of the development team, there are such popular and actively used nowadays methods, as MoSCoW, story map (User story mapping) and proactive improvement. Among the considered methods, based on quantitative assessment, is Kano's model, the method based on the creation of evaluation sheets, the method for estimating relative priorities for a set of functions offered by Carl Wigers and the method of structuring quality functions (Quality Function Deployment). Depending on the features of the project, customer requirements, the wishes of the development team and the other objective or subjective fac-tors, the project can use one or several prioritization methods at the same time or the combination of them. In addition, some of the considered methods can be used in short-term planning, the others – in the long-term, but there are those that can be used at each stage.