Main principles
- Respect how human mind works
- Don’t do the same work twice
- Learn from what we do, now what we say
I built Task Compass because I was frustrated. I’ve been using to-do lists for years, on paper and in apps. Writing tasks down solved the problem of forgetting what to do, but it didn’t solve the problem of tracking what’s important. The second issue was that looking at the to-do list would overwhelm me, because my brain thought that I have to do those tasks all at once.
1. Respect How Our Minds Work
Pairwise comparisons are the first class citizen
We are not good at assigning an absolute score to individual list items. We’re slightly better at stack-ranking. We excel at comparing things.
Which task is more important?
This is a natural, intuitive question. It doesn’t demand a complex internal rating system; it’s a simple, honest choice.
This process offloads the rest of the cognitive burden of prioritization to the app.
Looking at the entire list not required
When you open Task Compass, you’re not presented with a long to-do list.
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If there’s still prioritization work to be done, you’re shown two tasks and asked to choose the more important one.
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If prioritization is complete, the app shows you your #1 priority and a button to start the Pomodoro timer.
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If you want to see more, you can see your #2 and #3 tasks.
2. Do the work only once
The app remembers your decisions, so it won’t ask you about the same two tasks twice. It builds an internal importance ranking based on your choices, but it won’t overwhelm you with the entire list; the whole point is that you only need to see your most important task at any given moment.
If you said that A is more important than B, the app will always put A above B in the ranking.
As you keep using the app, it will ask you for comparisons that are necessary to update the importance ranking.
3. Detect Resistance Automatically
There’s often a gap between our intentions and our actions. We say a task is our #1 priority, but then we spend three days avoiding it. Your actions speak louder than your words.
Task Compass listens to your actions. It doesn’t ask you to guess how “difficult” a task will be. It simply watches what you complete. If an important task keeps sitting on your list, the app recognizes this as resistance. It learns what you’re avoiding, and helps you address it.