Do tasks from the top of the list to the bottom.
A meta-task “Prioritize” will almost always be near the top. It prompts you to tap the task that should be closer to the top of the list. The app logs that comparison and updates the list, whose order will be slightly more correct.
If there’s an area of your life where you’re overwhelmed by a deluge of small, unrelated tasks, this app is for you.
I knew I needed this app when I became a father. I became so time-constrained that my choice of what to do each day became a choice of what would be most disruptive to leave until tomorrow. I needed a system for helping me to feel as good as possible about what I was able to get done each day.
The goal is for you to enter a flow state:
There are not that many buttons to press anyway. :)
Priorities in Motion tracks how much time you spend in the “Prioritize” task, both by task and by day. Since you’re not doing anything on your list during that time, that time is considered “wasted.”
When the time spent prioritizing a task approaches the time it would take to just do the task, I recommend just doing it immediately, or removing it from your list. You’ll be prompted to assert that a task still belongs on the list after every 60 seconds spent prioritizing it.
Long-press a task and tap “Focus” to immediately make it #1 on the list. It will return to its old position when you stop focusing on it. Adding more tasks while a task is focused won’t dislodge it.
Manually focusing on tasks cuts down on the time you spend prioritizing, so I recommend doing it whenever you notice a clear winner—or just something you want to get off your list.
How important a task is to you changes over time, so unfortunately you need to delete comparisons periodically.
One comparison will be deleted every time you complete a task to help keep your priorities fresh, which may be enough. But you can delete them in bulk from the Options (Gear) > Reset menu, or delete only comparisons involving to a single task by pressing the “Reprioritize” button in its context menu.
I have an explicit question in mind when I prioritize. Usually one of these:
The first question is the best because it works positively (which task makes me happier?) and negatively (which task minimizes tomorrow’s regret?), and having a fixed time horizon makes it easy to imagine both possible futures.
The other questions sometimes come into play when the time spans of two tasks are wildly different, like “water my plants” and “read a book” because, realistically, if I start with watering my plant, I’ll also have time to read, but if I read first, I might not get to the plant.
For example, the reward for doing something at work is largely incomparable to the reward for doing something with my family, so I keep those lists separate.
Priorities in Motion only supports one list at a time, unfortunately. My work tasks tend to be amorphous and inappropriate for this app, so I use Priorities in Motion for my home todo list and a different system at work.
If your goal is just to read more, put “read a book” in your list and have a separate reading list. Don’t add a separate task for every book. Their ranks would be very unstable because spending time with one book affects how important it is to you to read other books.
Depending on how you use it, Priorities in Motion’s algorithm can be like a greedy bin-packing algorithm for your day. To avoid degenerate solutions, keep tasks roughly the same size—at least in the same ballpark. Consider “read a book for 30 minutes” instead of “read a book”. After 30 minutes, you can rank it again (perhaps with Reprioritize in the long-press menu); its importance might increase if you’re really sucked in, or decrease if now you’re ready to shift gears. Consider the pomodoro technique.
If you add a task prefixed with a time like “[9:00am]” and a space, then it will automatically be marked inactive until that time. Example:
[6:30pm] Take the garbage to the curb
A single task can be a checklist if you separate the steps with “>>”. Completing one step will cross it off and resurface the next step. A step other than the first one can be prefixed with a time interval like “[+1h30m]” or “[+24h]” to make it inactive for that much time after its predecessor is completed. Example:
[10:00am] Start laundry >> [+1h15m] Move laundry to the dryer >> [+2h] Put away the laundry
E-mail me at tom@alltom.com