Managing a large number of tasks with TROG bar

I'm new to the TROG bar system and am struggling in one area. I manage several groups and have to juggle a large number of tasks (100-200 at a time, not including "Someday" tasks). The TROG bar approach requires you to enter dates for the tasks to be processed, but with so many tasks I find myself really struggling to make the system work--urgent tasks are easy to schedule as the dates are near, but I don't know what an appropriate date is for many tasks that need to be done but have more flexible timeframes for completion, including important but not urgent tasks. In my old system (just using Outlook tasks, with categories for Today, Tomorrow, Next 7 Days, and Next 30 Days) I could give myself a relative sense of timing and drag and drop to establish a priority order for tasks within each category without scheduling dates except for tasks with firm deadlines.  With TROG bar, I find myself having to guess a lot--can I get to this task in two weeks, or will it take 4 weeks before I can start this?  If the task is less important than another task that I've already scheduled, then I have to wonder when I scheduled that other task so that the tasks will appear in the correct order.  My job is pretty fluid and many tasks shift in importance over time, so in my old system I could just drag and drop to reflect updated priorities and visually see the new priority list, but with TROG bar it appears that I need to go in and change the dates to change the TaskSense order, which doesn't give me the same visual context and takes far more time.  It may be that in my situation the TROG bar just isn't the right tool for me, but I want to make sure that I am understanding the workflow and thinking about this the right way.  Any advice?


  • Your category system is similar to using "soft" dates in TRO, but it can be hard, because it requires you to manage the date question yourself. In Trog, using the Due date as your soft date will give reasonably good results. If you would have set the date category to "next 30 days", just set a due date 30 days out. Trog manages this information in a fuzzy way (if you want a specific "hard" date, use the reminder).

    An alternate option would be to add your "date" categories to the "Someday/Maybe" category list in Trog (Options->Categories and Contacts). Categories in this list will cause the related tasks to no longer need a date. A side effect is that any task assigned to one of these categories will be given lowest priority, so TaskSense won't be very useful.
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