Sorting sub-goals
The Sort button in the map toolbar (right next to Arrange) sorts the sub-goals under every parent by what you care about right now: what is burning, what you planned, who works on what, or what is in progress. The structure of the map does not change — nothing is re-parented, only siblings in a row are reordered.
Four keys
- Deadline — earliest deadline first. The earliest deadline in the whole branch decides: a category without a deadline of its own, but with a sub-goal due the day after tomorrow, comes before a category due in a month. No deadline goes last.
- Plan (when I want to work on it) — by the "plan" field. The deadline is not touched; no plan goes last.
- Assignee — by the name shown on the card; one person's sub-goals end up side by side. Unassigned goes last.
- Status — in progress, then not started, done last.
Ties are broken by deadline, then by title — and whatever has equal values stays where it was. The root and the main goal are not sorted; sticky notes keep their place.
What happens to the map
Sort reorders the nodes and saves it, just like Arrange — the map is recomputed in the style it currently has and re-centred. If you don't like the result, Undo restores the previous placement. Arrange keeps the order afterwards: you can keep cycling the three styles and the row stays sorted.
The button remembers the last key per map, but only to highlight it in the menu: opening a map never rearranges it — writing to the map is always your click.
Where the button is not
- in My map — it sorts itself by deadline and the "Delegated" tab has its own By deadline / By person / By project switch,
- on a read-only map and in public views,
- in kanban — there the layout is driven by move rules; Arrange and Sort come back once they are switched off.
On a narrow screen the button is just an icon next to Arrange; the icon shows the chosen key.
Next
- Arranging — three map styles on one button
- My map — the cross-project view with its own ordering
- The map and goals — the whole map at a glance