What the four boxes actually separate
Importance and urgency get treated as the same thing in conversation and they are not. Importance is about consequence: how much worse things are if this never gets done well. Urgency is about the clock: how soon the consequence arrives. Rating them separately produces four combinations, and only one of them is hard.
| Quadrant | The trap |
|---|---|
| Important and urgent | None, really. These get done because they shout. |
| Important, not urgent | This is the one. It slides a day at a time until it becomes important and urgent, usually at the worst moment. |
| Urgent, not important | Feels productive, costs a whole morning. Shorten it or hand it over. |
| Neither | Do not schedule it; ask whether it needs doing at all. |
The second row is the reason the method survives. Nothing about a quiet deadline makes it announce itself, so it needs a slot booked or it does not happen.
Moving the thresholds instead of re-scoring
People are generous when rating their own work, so at the default of 4 the top-left box often fills up. Raise the important threshold to 5 and only the things that genuinely cannot wait survive. Go the other way — drop it to 3 — when the list is all small maintenance and everything is falling into the bottom row, and you get a usable relative order out of it.
Sliding one threshold is faster than re-rating twenty lines, and watching where the list splits cleanly is informative in itself. If no threshold produces a division you find convincing, the ratings are the problem, not the cutoff.
How today gets filled
Tasks are taken in quadrant order, and within a quadrant by a score of importance × 2 + urgency, longest-first broken toward the shorter task. Each one goes in if it still fits in the remaining time. If it does not fit, it is skipped and the next is tried, which is why a short task from further down sometimes lands ahead of a long one above it — the alternative is leaving the last forty minutes of the day empty.
The number to put in the time field is not your working day. It is what is left after meetings, travel, messages and the interruptions you can predict. For most people on an eight-hour day that number struggles to exceed four or five hours, and entering eight is the single most common reason the resulting plan does not survive contact with the afternoon.
Line format and what happens to bad input
One task per line: task|importance|urgency|minutes. Tabs work in place of pipes, so four columns copied out of a spreadsheet paste in directly. Leave the minutes column off and the task counts as zero minutes, which means it will always fit into today — the tool warns you when that has happened, because it quietly inflates what the day looks capable of holding. Importance and urgency outside 1-5 are pulled into range; a non-numeric value in either column drops the whole line, and every dropped line is listed under the results so you can see exactly what is missing from the totals rather than wondering why the count looks short.
Questions people ask
Why did a task lower down get scheduled ahead of one above it?
Because the one above it did not fit in the time remaining. The filler works down the priority order and takes whatever still fits, so a 20-minute item can land ahead of a 3-hour item when there is only an hour left. If you would rather start the long one and let it run past today, split it into stages on separate lines — that is closer to how it will actually go anyway.
How do I enter an hour and a half?
As 90. The minutes column takes a plain number, so text like "1h 30m" or "1.5 hrs" is not read and the line is dropped. This is deliberate rather than an oversight: allowing several time formats means guessing at ambiguous ones, and a task silently scheduled at the wrong length is worse than a line you can see was rejected.
Everything on my list is important. What do I do?
Raise the important threshold to 5 and see what is left. If the answer is still most of the list, the ratings are not separating anything and the useful question changes: not what is important, but what happens if each one slips a week. That is a question with different answers, and it produces a usable order where the importance rating did not.
Is the list saved between visits?
No. Everything runs in the page and nothing is stored or transmitted, so a refresh clears it. Use the copy-as-text box at the bottom of the results to keep a copy, and paste the original task lines back into the box tomorrow if you want to carry the list forward.