Task prioritizer

What goes into the ranking

• Priority — low, medium, high, or critical, set when you add the task
• Deadline urgency — due today and due tomorrow outrank due-next-week, and overdue tasks rank highest of all
• Time fit — how well a task's estimated length matches the time you actually have right now
• Workload impact — how much of the task one session would actually finish
• Task age — a small, deliberately modest boost so a task you added three weeks ago doesn't get buried forever

These combine into a single score per task — urgency counts for 35%, importance 25%, time fit 15%, task age 15%, and workload impact 10%. The full breakdown is on the methodology page. The highest-scoring task is recommended first, and you can see the next-best options with "Choose another."

Importance vs. urgency: setting priority so the ranking works

Priority and deadline measure different things, and the prioritizer treats them separately. Priority is how much a task matters. The deadline is how soon it matters. Urgency carries more weight (35%) than importance (25%), so a real due date usually does more for a task's rank than bumping its priority.

• If a task has a real deadline, enter it. With no due date, a task gets no urgency credit at all. All else being equal, a low-priority task due today outranks a critical task with no deadline.
• Keep "critical" rare. If every task is critical, priority stops telling them apart, and the ranking comes down to deadlines, time fit, and age.
• Add a time estimate. Without one, Pomop assumes the task fits whatever time you have, so it can't tell a five-minute job from a half-day one.

A worked example

Say you have 25 minutes free and two tasks, both added today:

• Write the quarterly report — high priority, due in five days, about two hours of work
• Send an invoice — medium priority, due today, about 15 minutes of work

The report is more important, but the invoice wins, 0.63 to 0.40. It's due within 24 hours, so it scores far higher on urgency, and it fits your 25 minutes and can be finished in one sitting — while 25 minutes would only dent the report. Move the invoice's deadline to next week and the order flips: the report comes out ahead, 0.40 to 0.39, because its higher importance and closer deadline now outweigh the invoice's better fit.

That's the point of weighing several signals at once: neither "most important first" nor "shortest first" gets both of those situations right.

Why not just sort by deadline?

Sorting by deadline alone treats a low-priority task due tomorrow the same as a critical one — and ignores tasks with no deadline entirely, which then never surface. A real prioritizer has to weigh several signals at once, the way Pomop's Decision Engine does, rather than picking a single column to sort by. SeeEisenhower Matrix vs. time blocking for how this compares to two popular manual methods.

How to use it

1. Add your tasks with a priority, an optional deadline, and how long each will take
2. Open Home to see the top-ranked task and why it was picked
3. Review the full ranked list any time on the Tasks page, or see ranked tasks laid out by due date on the task calendar

Staring at a list that's already too long to rank? Start with what to do when you have too many tasks.

Prioritizing isn't the same as planning your day

The prioritizer ranks your whole list. Some nearby questions need a different view of the same tasks:

• "What needs my attention today?" The daily planner covers what's overdue, what's due today, and how much time it adds up to.
• "Which one should I start right now?" What should I do next picks the single task for the time you have, and says why.
• "When is everything due?" The task calendar lays your deadlines out by date.

Frequently asked questions