Formula to prioritize tasks based on weight and date - math

Question

Is there a formula or algorithm which can prioritize items based on weight and a date? For instance, a critical item would always be at the top of the list while a two normal items would be prioritized based on their due date.

Answer 1

Scheduling is one of the most-studied areas of computer science, which is convenient, because it gives a lot of prior art that you can learn from.
Perhaps the easiest approach is Earliest Deadline First -- where you schedule the task with the first deadline and work on it until it blocks. Then work on the next earliest deadline. The downside is that low-priority tasks that take a long time might stall higher-priority tasks.
It might be worthwhile to determine if your scheduling must be hard, firm, or soft -- sometimes it makes sense to drop tasks completely and finish nearly everything on time than to finish everything but half a second too late.

Answer 2

Yes. This can either be done by defining a comparison function that checks priority first. I.e.
// Returns n < 0, 0, or n > 1 if value1 is less than, equal to or greater
compare(value1, value2) {
if(value1.priority != value2.priority) {
return value1.priority - value2.priority;
}
return value1.date - value2.date;
}
Alternatively, this function returns a value calculated from the date and the priority, this can be used to compare tasks and order them by priority (and then date):
// Returns
task.GetValue() {
return me.GetDateAsIntegerValue() + MAX_DATE_VALUE * me.GetPriority();
}
But just as sarnold mentioned, this is a highly studied area.

Answer 3

A different way to look at this is as a ranking problem. If you take these two values, weight and priority as inputs, you can create a table of paired comparisons that decompose items into their inputs (weight and priority) and outputs are relative orderings.
Consider, say, item 42 and item 69, denoted X42 and X69: if you have their weights and priority (W42, P42) and (W69, P69), you'd like to know if X42 should appear before X69, after it, or at an equal position. If you have a training set, you can tag whether one is preferred to the other.
What we're lacking here is a method for comparing these. A very simple method is to use logistic regression on the differences, i.e. a simple function f( (W_A - W_B), (P_A - P_B)), or f((W42 - W69),(P42 - P69)), in this case. If the result is above some threshold, then A is preferred to B, otherwise B is preferred to A. You can use this to sort the results.
As usual, most of the results online are not very accessible to beginners. Here's a short chapter that may be helpful in understanding the logistic regression. However, if you'd like to address such matters in more depth, the statistics StackExchange site would be better.
You'll have to decide: (1) if what you're looking at can be decomposed into an additive function of the weight and priority, and, if so, (2) the loss function or objective function that you need to minimize, so that you can get the optimal parameters for this additive function. An ordinal logistic model is one choice, ordinal probit another, and there are tons of other options. If you don't use an additive function (i.e. a linear combination), you'll have a challenging range of possibilities to consider, so it's best to start with something simple.

Answer 4

You can separate the tasks by rating the impact 1-10 (10 being highest) and the output needed 1-10 (also 10 being hardest)
You add the numbers together and divide by two. The result will be the priority ranking of your task 1-10 (10 being most important).
Example:
Check Emails: impact 2 output 1 = 1.5
Call potential customer: impact 10 output 2 = 6
From this example the calling of the customer would then be placed in a higher priority than checking emails.