Master all 10 Task Modes and understand the 14-factor priority algorithm
26 Slides • 10 Task Modes • 14 Priority Factors • Complete Scoring Details
Every task is scored using 14 weighted factors organized into two tiers
Why 68/32? Core factors handle most decisions. Advanced factors fine-tune for power users.
Each mode emphasizes different factors for specialized prioritization
All 14 factors
Energy matching
Reduce bottlenecks
People first
Complete started work
The signature mode that balances all 5 core factors equally. Designed to identify tasks that can realistically be completed or meaningfully advanced in a focused 10-minute session.
Urgency (20%) + Deadline (20%) + Importance (20%) + Future Impact (20%) + Time Fit (20%)
By considering time estimates, this mode surfaces tasks you can actually finish in your available window, creating momentum through completed work.
Daily task management, building habits, maintaining productivity without overwhelm
Start of your day, after meetings, when you have limited time windows
You have 10 minutes before your next call. 10-Min-Fit surfaces "Reply to client email" (5 min, urgent) over "Write quarterly report" (2 hours, important but not urgent).
Maximizes urgency and deadline factors to surface the most time-sensitive tasks. Emergency and overdue items jump to the top regardless of other considerations.
Urgency (40%) + Deadline (40%) + Importance (15%) + Other (5%)
Humans naturally devalue future rewards. This mode counteracts procrastination by making imminent deadlines impossible to ignore.
Crisis management, deadline-heavy periods, catching up on overdue work
End of quarter, before vacations, when you feel behind
Three tasks due today, two marked "urgent." Critical-First ranks them by exact deadline time and urgency level, ensuring nothing slips through.
Prioritizes smaller, faster tasks first. Tasks with lower time estimates rise to the top, creating rapid completion cycles that build momentum.
Time Estimate (Inverted 35%) + Urgency (25%) + Deadline (20%) + Importance (20%)
Research shows that small wins create positive emotions that fuel further productivity. Completing 5 small tasks feels better than partially finishing 1 big one.
Clearing backlogs, low-energy periods, getting unstuck
After lunch slump, end of day, when overwhelmed by task volume
Your list has 20 items. Chunked surfaces all 5-minute tasks first, helping you knock out 8 items in an hour and dramatically shrink your visible backlog.
Combines simplicity with progress. Surfaces tasks that are both easy to complete AND already partially done, maximizing the ratio of effort to completion.
Complexity (Inverted 30%) + Progress (30%) + Time Estimate (20%) + Urgency (20%)
Our brains remember incomplete tasks more than completed ones. Quick-Wins targets tasks that are closest to completion to release that mental tension.
Building confidence, overcoming procrastination, mental energy management
When feeling stuck, after a difficult task, to warm up your productivity engine
You have a complex report at 80% and a simple email reply. Quick-Wins surfaces the report because the remaining 20% is easier than starting fresh on the email.
Doubles the weight of deadline proximity. Tasks due soonest always appear first, with granular time-based sorting (hours, not just days).
Deadline Proximity (50%) + Urgency (25%) + Importance (15%) + Other (10%)
Work expands to fill the time available. By constantly showing the nearest deadline, this mode creates artificial time pressure that focuses your effort.
Project managers, deadline-driven roles, end-of-period sprints
Week before major deliverables, quarter-end, product launches
Five tasks due this week. Deadline-Crunch sorts by exact hour: Tuesday 2pm, Wednesday 9am, Wednesday 5pm, etc. Never miss a deadline again.
The most sophisticated mode. Activates all 14 factors with normalized weights, creating a holistic prioritization that considers urgency, team impact, energy, and behavioral patterns.
All 14 factors active: Core (68%) + Advanced (32%) with proportional distribution
Goes beyond urgent/important to include team dynamics, personal energy, and behavioral signals for complete situational awareness.
Executives, senior managers, complex role juggling
Daily driver for experienced users, complex project phases
A task blocking 3 teammates rises above a solo deadline. Balance sees both the deadline AND the multiplied team impact, making the right trade-off.
Matches task requirements to your current energy and cognitive capacity. High-energy tasks surface when you're fresh; simple tasks when you're drained.
Energy Level (25%) + Cognitive Complexity (25%) + Time of Day (20%) + Core Factors (30%)
Your brain cycles through 90-minute high/low energy periods. Flow Sync aligns demanding tasks with your natural peaks.
Knowledge workers, creative roles, those with variable energy
Morning peak hours for complex work, post-lunch for simple tasks
It's 9 AM and you're fresh. Flow Sync surfaces "Design new architecture" over "File expense report," matching your peak cognition to demanding work.
Prioritizes tasks that unblock teammates. If your work is preventing others from progressing, those tasks jump to the top automatically.
Blocks Others (35%) + Stakeholder Waiting (30%) + Deadline (20%) + Urgency (15%)
We're 65% more likely to complete tasks when others depend on us. This mode leverages that psychology to eliminate bottlenecks.
Team leads, collaborative projects, cross-functional roles
Sprint planning, before standups, when managing dependencies
Your code review blocks 3 developers. Team Unblocker surfaces it above your personal deadline because the multiplied team impact is higher.
Protects your relationships by prioritizing tasks that, if delayed, could damage personal or professional connections. People-impacting tasks rise first.
Delay Consequence: Relationship (40%) + Stakeholder (25%) + Urgency (20%) + Deadline (15%)
Humans feel relationship losses more strongly than other types. This mode makes relationship risks visible before damage occurs.
Client-facing roles, managers, relationship-driven work
Before client meetings, relationship maintenance, after conflicts
A friend's birthday card and a project deadline compete. Relationship Guard weighs the irreplaceable relationship moment higher than the reschedulable work task.
Focuses on completing work you've already started. Tasks with existing progress and older creation dates rise to the top to reduce work-in-progress inventory.
Partial Progress (35%) + Task Age (30%) + Urgency (20%) + Importance (15%)
Incomplete tasks occupy mental RAM. Momentum Finish clears that cognitive load by closing open loops systematically.
Reducing cognitive load, clearing backlogs, end-of-week cleanup
Friday afternoons, before vacations, when feeling scattered
You have a report at 90% from 5 days ago and a new urgent request. Momentum Finish surfaces the report because completing it releases significant mental energy.
Every task is scored across these dimensions, ranked by maximum point impact
Maximum Combined Score: ~4,410 points | Higher scores = higher priority in your list
The closer a deadline, the higher the priority boost. Overdue tasks receive maximum points. This is the single most impactful factor in the algorithm.
Humans naturally devalue future consequences. By giving massive weight to imminent deadlines, we counteract our tendency to procrastinate and force attention on time-sensitive work.
Task due in 4 hours: The algorithm calculates remaining time (4 hrs = 240 min), maps to the curve, and awards +600 points. This task jumps above anything due tomorrow.
Always set realistic deadlines. Artificial deadlines train the system (and you) to ignore urgency. Real deadlines create real motivation.
User-defined urgency level that categorizes how time-sensitive a task is. Emergency tasks (health, safety, critical business) receive maximum priority.
Based on President Eisenhower's urgent-important distinction: "What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important." This factor captures the urgency dimension.
Emergency: Medical, safety, legal deadlines
Urgent: Same-day business needs
Moderate: This-week commitments
Low: Nice-to-have tasks
Overusing EMERGENCY devalues the system. Reserve it for true crises. If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.
A 1-10 rating of how significant this task is to your long-term goals. Separates truly important work from busywork, regardless of urgency.
Formula: Importance rating x 50 points
20% of your tasks drive 80% of your results. The importance rating helps identify that vital 20% so they don't get lost in the noise of urgent-but-unimportant busywork.
9-10: Career-defining, major goals
6-8: Significant business impact
3-5: Necessary but routine
1-2: Administrative, optional
Importance is about outcomes, not effort. A 5-minute decision can be importance 10/10 if it shapes your strategy.
Tracks whether your task is preventing teammates from progressing. Each additional person blocked adds bonus points, scaling team-wide impact.
Formula: 300 base + (50 x additional people blocked)
Research shows we're 65% more likely to complete tasks when others are counting on us. This factor leverages that psychology to eliminate team bottlenecks.
Code reviews: Blocks developer progress
Approvals: Blocks team decisions
Deliverables: Blocks downstream work
Information: Blocks planning
This factor gets 35% weight in Team Unblocker mode, making it the dominant consideration for collaborative work.
Categorizes what happens if you delay this task. Career-impacting delays are weighted highest, followed by relationship, financial, and convenience impacts.
Humans feel losses about 2x more strongly than equivalent gains. By making potential losses visible, this factor motivates action before damage occurs.
Career: Missing promotion review deadline
Relationship: Forgetting anniversary
Financial: Late payment penalties
Inconvenience: Rescheduling meeting
This factor gets 40% weight in Relationship Guard mode, specifically boosting relationship-tagged consequences.
Identifies who is actively waiting for this task. External stakeholders (clients) outrank internal ones because external relationships are harder to repair.
Stakeholder satisfaction is heavily influenced by expectation setting. This factor ensures you meet commitments in priority order of relationship value.
Clients: Revenue-generating, external
Executives: Career-influencing, internal
Colleagues: Collaborative, peer-level
Mark the highest-level person waiting.
A task can have both: blocking 2 developers (+350) while a client waits (+300) = +650 total team impact points.
Measures whether this task builds toward your future (+) or winds down past commitments (-). Positive values indicate investment in growth; negative values indicate divestment.
Formula: Rating (-10 to +10) x 30 points
Inspired by investment strategy. Just as you'd invest more in growing assets and divest from declining ones, this factor helps you allocate time to future-building work.
+10: Learning new skill for promotion
+5: Building new client relationship
0: Routine maintenance task
-5: Closing out old project
-10: Winding down departing role
Divestment tasks get deprioritized to make room for growth-oriented work.
Rewards tasks you've already started. The more progress made, the higher the priority boost. Encourages completing work rather than abandoning it.
Formula: Progress percentage x 3 points
Our brains remember incomplete tasks more vividly than completed ones. Started tasks create mental tension. This factor helps resolve that tension by pushing near-complete work to the top.
Reduces context-switching: You already have the context loaded.
Honors sunk cost productively: Don't waste past effort.
Clears mental RAM: Completion releases cognitive load.
This factor gets 35% weight in Momentum Finish mode, making started tasks the primary focus.
Deprioritizes tasks that are blocked by external dependencies. If you can't act on something, it shouldn't dominate your focus.
From Getting Things Done: if you can't act on something right now, it shouldn't be on your active list. This factor pushes blocked items down so you focus on what you can actually do.
External (-200): Waiting for vendor, client approval, third-party API
Internal (-100): Waiting for colleague review, manager decision, IT setup
Tasks don't disappear—they're just deprioritized. When the dependency clears, remove the "waiting on" flag and the task rises automatically.
Old tasks gradually rise in priority. Prevents the "someday" pile from growing forever by naturally surfacing neglected items.
Based on Getting Things Done principles: items that linger become mental weight. The age factor acts as an automatic weekly review, surfacing items you might have forgotten.
A low-priority task created 10 days ago now gets +150 points. Combined with its base importance, it might finally surface above newer but less important work.
This factor gets 30% weight in Momentum Finish mode, helping clear your backlog systematically.
Slightly deprioritizes complex tasks unless you're in deep work mode. Matches task demands to your available mental bandwidth.
Your brain has limited working memory. Complex tasks require more slots. By default, the system slightly favors simpler tasks to preserve mental energy for when you explicitly choose deep work.
Simple: Single-step, familiar, routine
Moderate: Multi-step, some decisions
Complex: Creative, novel, many dependencies
This factor gets 25% weight in Flow Sync mode, but the sign FLIPS during peak energy hours—complex tasks get boosted when you're fresh.
Gives a small boost to high-energy tasks to encourage tackling challenging work. Supports the "eat the frog" productivity philosophy.
Brian Tracy's principle: tackle your hardest task first when your willpower is strongest. This factor ensures demanding tasks don't keep sliding to tomorrow.
High: Strategic thinking, difficult conversations, creative work
Medium: Focused execution, problem-solving
Low: Administrative, routine, familiar tasks
This factor gets 25% weight in Flow Sync mode, which also considers time of day to match energy requirements to your natural rhythms.
Each time you snooze a task, it loses 50 priority points. Prevents the "snooze trap" where important tasks keep getting pushed to tomorrow indefinitely.
Formula: -50 x number of snoozes
Snoozing feels productive but isn't. Each snooze is a micro-decision to not act. The penalty forces honest evaluation: if you keep snoozing, maybe delete the task entirely.
1 snooze: Probably legitimate timing issue
2-3 snoozes: Task may need to be broken down
4+ snoozes: Consider if this task should exist at all
The snooze penalty works with other factors. A truly urgent task will stay high despite snoozes. A low-priority task will sink—as it should.
Tracks how often you view a task without acting on it. Surfaces procrastinated items so you can address the root cause of avoidance.
Formula: -25 x (skips + views without action)
If you keep looking at a task but not doing it, something is wrong. Maybe the task is unclear, too big, or emotionally charged. Avoidance is data about your resistance.
Clarify: Is the next action clear?
Shrink: Can you do just 5 minutes?
Delegate: Should someone else do this?
Delete: Is this actually necessary?
Review your high-avoidance tasks weekly. Patterns reveal where you need skill development, emotional processing, or better task definition.
You now understand all 10 task modes and 14 priority factors
Detailed Algorithm Documentation: 10towin.co/taskrank.html
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