You probably have a task manager. Maybe two. A notes app, a to-do list, a Notion database, sticky notes on your monitor. And yet, when Monday morning arrives, you still have to figure out what to work on first. The tools capture everything. None of them tell you what matters.
The task management paradox
The promise of task management tools is that capturing everything will help you stay on top of things. In practice, the longer your list gets, the harder it is to use. A backlog of 47 items isn't a prioritized queue — it's a pile. You end up picking based on what feels manageable, what you feel like doing, or what arrived in your inbox most recently.
The result is a system that makes you feel productive (you're capturing!) without actually helping you do the right things.
The problem with long to-do lists
Length is not priority. A list of 50 tasks has no inherent order — unless you impose one. And imposing a priority order on 50 items is genuinely hard. You'd have to compare every item against every other item, hold them all in your head at once, and arrive at a consistent ranking. That's not a task, it's a cognitive marathon.
Most people give up and just work top-to-bottom, or mark a handful of things as 'high priority' and hope for the best. Neither approach scales.
The list isn't the problem. The missing ingredient is a ranking — and ranking is what most tools skip.
Pairwise comparison for personal use
Ranking a long list is hard. Choosing between two specific things is easy. Pairwise comparison exploits this difference: instead of ranking everything at once, you answer one question at a time — which of these two tasks matters more right now?
Each comparison takes a few seconds. You're not doing cognitive gymnastics — you're making a quick, local judgment. Over a series of comparisons, an Elo-based algorithm (the same system used to rank chess players) builds a reliable ranked list from your answers.
- You never have to hold the whole list in mind at once.
- Each comparison is low-stakes — you can always re-prioritize.
- The resulting rank reflects your actual judgment, not recency or optimism.
The Focus Grid: a portfolio view of your priorities
Most people don't have one to-do list. They have several — work tasks, personal projects, a reading list, fitness goals. Each is a separate pile, and it's hard to see across all of them at once.
The Focus Grid solves this by showing every list as a card in a single view, with three pieces of information: the stability of the current ranking (how confident the algorithm is that the order is right), the #1 priority task right now, and a single action.
- High stability → Focus. The ranking is settled. Open the list and work on the top item.
- Low stability → Prioritize. Do a few more comparisons before committing.
The grid gives you an answer to the question 'what should I work on right now?' across all your contexts in one glance.
Building the habit
The workflow has three parts. First, capture: add tasks to the right list as they come in. Don't worry about order — just get them into the system. Second, compare: spend five minutes a day doing pairwise comparisons. Open any low-stability list and work through a few pairs. The ranking improves with every comparison. Third, focus: open the Focus Grid and work on whatever is at the top of your highest-priority list.
Contexts help keep things organised. Grouping your lists into Work, Personal, and Side projects means the Focus Grid shows you the right scope depending on what mode you're in.
When solo scales to team
One of the less obvious benefits of maintaining a well-ranked personal backlog is what happens when you bring it into a team setting. If you've already run pairwise comparisons on your own list, you arrive at a planning session with considered priorities — not just off-the-cuff reactions.
Preeority's workshop mode lets a whole team vote on the same list simultaneously, using the same pairwise method. If you've been working solo first, running a team workshop is a natural extension: you already know what you think. Now you find out what the team thinks.