# Ranking tasks by impact and effort **See Also:** >[!summary] >My twist on the Eisenhower Matrix [[productivity]] method replaces importance and urgency with impact and effort. - It seems to me that "importance" and "urgency" are too subjective. - Things that seem important can become unimportant as a situation changes and evolves. - Also, importance may be subjectively determined by other agents, robbing you of further control. - The forces that can change the importance of a thing are often not under your control, so you end up having to review your assessment of importance often. - This is meta-work that consumes otherwise usable work time. - Ditto for urgency. - My approach uses *impact* and *effort*. - The impact (of completing, or not completing, a task) is the impact on you. - This is something that is more immediately apparent and relevant to you. - Impact might change over time, due to changes in circumstance, but since this represents the impact *on you*, it should be easier to assess and more natural. - The effort required to complete a task is the effort you must put into it. - This is something that is much more under your own control than importance or urgency. - Generally, I think of effort as "can I complete this task in a single sitting?" - Whether I *do* complete it in a single sitting or not, is irrelevant. This is what makes it a measure of *effort* rather than *duration*. - Anything that I can complete in a single sitting (e.g., reviewing a journal paper), I call low effort. - Anything that requires more than one sitting (e.g., writing a journal paper) is high effort. - The resulting four categories are, in order from most to least important: - high impact, low effort - high impact, high effort - low impact, low effort - low impact, high effort - It may seem counter-intuitive to rank low-effort tasks to be more important than high-effort ones, but the goal is to achieve the most significant outcomes with the least work. - Doing 3 high-impact (and low effort) tasks produces more significant outcomes than doing 1 high-impact (and high effort) task. - This approach also encourages breaking high-effort tasks into multiple lower-effort tasks. - This approach is easy to implement in systems that provide at least 3 levels of priority; you can use "no priority" to represent the last category. - Another factor that can influence the overall "importance" of a task is the task's deadline. - A short deadline will necessarily change how you decide which task to do. - If you have two tasks of the same impact and effort, but one is due tomorrow and another is due next week, then obviously you should do the one due tomorrow first. - Most task management apps allow multiple sorts, so if you sort by priority (i.e., impact+effort) and then by deadline, you should get a nicely ordered list of tasks that will immediately inform you which task should be next. - One of the best features of the task manager app [Toodledo.com](https://www.toodledo.com/) is its *importance* measure, which combines priority, due date, and other parameters into a single value. - An unfortunate shortcoming of Toodledo's importance measure, though, is that users cannot change the equation used to calculate. - This is quite frankly silly; it's easy to build that functionality in, and I'll never understand why they don't. - This lets you rank tasks in a way that accommodates every parameter that matters, not just priority (regardless of how you assign it). 2024-06-30 Update - I'm experimenting with a variation of the system described above. - I've changed it to a more conventional form, where high impact or effort is more important than low impact or effort. - The idea is that it's more likely I'll need to spend more time on high effort tasks, so they should be ranked higher. - Another variation I may try in the future is: 1. high impact, high effort 2. high impact, low effort 3. low impact, low effort 4. low impact, high effort - The idea here is that if a task is low-impact, I should prefer the easier ones to the harder ones.