Download for iOS (free): Task Compass beta 🛠
You know what needs doing. You’ve written it down. But staring at your list, you have no idea where to start. Everything feels important.
So you try rating each task: “How important is this from 1 to 10?” You assign stars, priorities, scores. Then most items end up with the same priority. Tomorrow something urgent arrives and your entire scale shifts.
The problem isn’t your system. It’s that you’re being asked to assign absolute values of importance. Humans are bad at this.
Task Compass takes a different approach. Instead of rating tasks individually, it asks one question repeatedly: “Which is more important: Task A or Task B?”
Choosing between two real tasks is natural. You make direct trade-offs. The app identifies your top 3 priorities with minimal questions—you don’t need to rank everything, just know what matters most right now.
Once you know what’s most important, the app helps you focus with an integrated Pomodoro timer. Start the task. Work uninterrupted. Make progress.
But here’s what happens in practice: Some important tasks sit incomplete for days. You keep choosing other work. You’re avoiding something.
Knowing importance isn’t enough. You also need to know which important tasks have resistance. This is the insight behind the Eisenhower Matrix: importance × resistance matters.
Traditional apps make you categorize tasks manually into quadrants. Task Compass does something different: it detects resistance automatically and suggests scheduling when it notices you’re avoiding something important.
You don’t predict which tasks will be difficult. The app learns by seeing which tasks you complete and which remain undone.
That important task sitting incomplete for three days? The system recognizes the pattern. You’re avoiding it. That’s resistance.
The app combines two sources:
These two dimensions determine when to suggest scheduling. You make all the choices. The app decides what questions to ask.
Rank importance: Answer comparative questions. The app identifies your top 3 priorities with minimal questions.
Work on what matters: Start Pomodoro timer on your most important task. Focus without distraction.
Get strategic clarity: The app notices completion patterns. When an important task remains incomplete, the app suggests scheduling it.
You make all the choices. The app decides what questions to ask.
Task Compass integrates with Apple Reminders. Your tasks sync automatically. No data migration, no duplicate systems.
Use Reminder lists to organize by project or context—home, work, personal. Enable any subset of lists at any time. The app handles this seamlessly.
Humans are surprisingly good at comparing importance across contexts. Enable multiple projects simultaneously and you’ll find out which project needs attention first. The comparisons work across contexts as naturally as within them.
You’ll benefit from Task Compass if you:
This isn’t for you if you need elaborate project hierarchies, dependencies, or time tracking. Task Compass does one thing exceptionally well: learning what you’re avoiding so you can address it strategically.
See Task Compass philosophy for deeper exploration of the approach.
©2025 Maciej Bliziński