How Sort Should Work

I’m delighted to see Sort high on the roadmap!

On Trello, there is an open question as to “how it should work?” I didn’t see a topic here, so wanted to share my ideal use-case.

I work as a consultant with groups. This is what happens.

  1. get team to come up with list of ideas

  2. prioritize through voting.

  3. is always messy, an outliner is critical. Some ideas are dupes or subparts of ideas etc. Tucking those under other topics is a way for the person to feel heard, but for it not to derail and split the conversation.

There are themes - then there are sub-parts to the themes.

So here’s how it should work. Let say we have two themes A and B, and under that we have three ideas each i) through vi) and i) and ii) have two additional sub thoughts a) and b).

So we go around the room and ask people to vote on i) through vi).
In front of each of those points we put the total number of votes that were gathered.

Ideally, then, we should be able to select (click and drag) those bullets, then select “sort” and see how those 6 different points fare. a) and b) move with the votes related to i) and ii) even though they weren’t vote-worthy in themselves.

We can then add up the total number of votes for each item (done by hand, but thats ok), and put that number in front of themes A and B respectively. We can collapse A and B, select those (click and drag) and then hit “sort” again, and it will move A and B into vote order.

While this seems trivial on this small case, when you have a dozens of themes and hundreds of ideas under those, then this kind of sorting becomes critical.

Back in the day there was a Mac only outliner called MORE that did some of this, and it was superb, there hasn’t been something like it for a long time. I’m a long time workflowy guy - but you guys are making me excited about outliners all over again! Thank you.

For basic sorting it would just be either A-Z or Z-A. Your use case sounds like it requires more advanced sorting though. And I think it would play well with this: Tag attributes

Actually I think simple is fine. Because if I put the vote number in front of the subject, then Z-A will fix it.
e.g
7 Marketing
11 Product Development
2 Rebates

When I sort, I just want the 11 to come to the top, with whatever sub categories it has stored under it. Again it seems trivial now, but when you have dozens of lists, and dozens of stubs, this simple sorting is super powerful and helpful. Can’t wait! Thanks for your reply and clarification.

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