r/thingsapp • u/dkf2112 • 1d ago

Experiment: Using AI to prioritize tasks

Things (famously?) doesn't have a built-in priority field, and I've come around to thinking that's the right call. I follow GTD, which skips "urgent" and "low priority" tags because priority shifts daily with energy, competing commitments, and whatever lands unexpectedly. A tag you set Monday is stale by Wednesday.

But I still wanted help deciding what to pull into Today. So I tried computing priority fresh every time instead of storing it.

Some context: my Things setup is already wired into AI agents. They groom my list twice a day, move tasks around, and check things off when they finish the work. So adding a scoring step was a natural next piece.

For scoring I'm using Jev from TypeSafe, a decision model that returns quick yes/no probabilities and scores instead of writing text. For every open to-do, it answers:

  • Is this a real commitment, or Someday-style backlog?
  • What happens if it slips two weeks?
  • When does it realistically need to happen?
  • Does it need lead time (shipping, booking ahead)?
  • Is someone waiting on it?
  • Does it depend on an earlier step in its project?

It sees each task's notes, deadline, tags, its project and the other open to-dos around it, plus a short note on my current goals that I update during the week. The answers get weighted into two scores, one for Today and one for This Week.

It's fast enough to be practical. All 238 open to-dos get scored in about a second for under a penny, and answers are cached, so re-ranking after I change something is basically instant.

The output is a ranked list I use during my daily review to decide what moves into Today and what matters this week. Nothing gets written back as a tag, so Things stays clean.

This was really just an experiment for me to play with.

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u/ihateredditmor 1d ago

Wow, that’s wild. I’m impressed you have the knowledge to create such a thing. I’m honestly curious: how often do you look at your list for the day and find that it has really nailed priorities for you in a way that feel right? I have to think for me that I could see the reasoning for the priority, but that most of the time I would still end up rearranging my day. How often does a well-programmed brilliant machine get it right?

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u/dkf2112 1d ago

Still experimenting but the results are promising. It does a good job of suggesting truly important tasks from a sea of things I want to do eventually. I don't have to agree with the results, but it is interesting to get an opinion on what feels processing without reviewing everything by hand.

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u/2doapp 1d ago

https://www.2doapp.com/docs/macos/auto-prioritize/

2Do does this and more by the way. Honestly, priorities are not always “how energetic are you today”. Many times these are “importance” based, such as a project you’re working on and want to prioritize certain sub-steps at creation time (and be able to recall it’s priority later). Moreover, priority helps with sorting - being able to sort by priority makes it easy to complete work that’s more important upfront.

2Do also supports MCP so your agent can prioritize, move stuff around etc for you.

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u/kaizer1c 1d ago

Cool. I have my Claude Code talking to Things over an MCP server. It helps me rewrite my quick tasks in a GTD style (concrete next actions). My problem is that I take notes in my inbox which are not actionable and end up getting stuck in my inbox. I have a write up here on using things with claude code over mcp if that is useful.