Our personal algorithms for productivity
Good prioritization seems simple, but is fiendishly difficult.
Most people have a rough idea of the important things they need to do, but they’re almost never able to start at the top and work their way down, knocking each task out in order. That’s because some tasks take minutes while others take weeks; some have dependencies on other people; some need big chunks of focus time, and some are often too intimidating to start. What we’re building at Toodo is an assistant that is able to learn from you how you like to get work done and what you need in order to feel empowered to do it.
Every person has a way of deciding what gets done and when. Some begin with urgency: looming deadlines dictate their day. Others start with importance: tackling the most meaningful work before anything else. Many combine the two, layering time, energy, and context into a personal calculus. In other words, each of us runs a personal algorithm. It’s not written down, but it governs how we prioritize and schedule. We weigh trade-offs: finish the report due tomorrow or make progress on the long-term strategy? Take a call at 3 p.m. because it fits the calendar, or protect the time for deep work? This algorithm evolves with experience, preferences, and constraints, becoming as individual as a fingerprint.
Most productivity tools, however, force people into rigid models—either purely time-based or purely priority-based. They rarely adapt to the nuance of how a specific individual actually makes decisions.
Our goal isn’t building an algorithm to manage your day, it’s to learn your personal algorithm so Toodo can better help you get work done. By observing patterns - how someone chooses between tasks, when they prefer to do creative work, which deadlines they bend and which they never miss - an intelligent platform can begin to mirror and refine that decision-making process. Over time, it doesn’t just schedule or rank tasks; it aligns with the individual’s own logic, surfacing the right task at the right moment for them.
The future of productivity isn’t universal rules or prescriptive frameworks. It’s tools that learn, adapt, and ultimately become personalized expressions of the way each person already thinks and works.
What Makes a Good Task? Novelty, relevance and timeliness in Toodo
Right now Mark and I are spending the vast majority of our time at Toodo on ‘task quality’ - making sure the recommendations you get on what to do are always useful, and that the tasks Toodo suggests are high priority.
We all have an intuitive grip on the “things we have to get done”, but codifying what makes one task ‘better’ than another is extremely slippery. Consider which of the following is a ‘better’ task:
On the surface the first task seems ‘better’ - more concrete, with a clear action and a deadline. The second task with an action to “review” seems vague, and maybe just bureaucratic busywork.
Context is important, though. If ‘Mark’ is your CEO, and Project Orion is a war room about an emerging PR incident, it quickly becomes extremely urgent.
How to design tenets that would apply correctly to literally anything that could come into your in-tray?
When sorting through the attributes of a ‘good’ task, I had a flashback to the first time I ever presented to the C-suite while I was at LinkedIn. During the call I got (rightfully) schooled by the CEO about the quality of the customer insights I was providing: “Good customer insights”, I was told, “are always 1) Novel, 2) Strategic, and 3) Timely”. To this day it is probably one of the best (most concise and true) pieces of professional feedback I’ve received.
The feedback settled somewhere deep in my core long-term memory and has never gone away. And it turns out that bringing it to bear on what makes a ‘good task’ is highly fruitful.
When deciding to create or update a task for one of our users, the following three attributes tend to give us a very good handle on whether it will be a ‘good’ task for them to do right now:
Novelty: Is this task based on some new information for the user (ie our website has just gone down)?
Relevance: Is the task for them specifically, and is it directly related to their goals?
Timeliness: Is this task urgent / is it important that they get started on it soon?
When you’re building an AI that helps people prioritize their work, it isn’t enough to just add into the system prompt, “tasks for the user should be novel, relevant and timely”. At the start, a model has very limited context on you, your work, your goals, your company, your colleagues etc. so it isn’t going to make good decisions on its own.
Toodo uses hundreds of signals to get a sense of a task’s novelty, relevance and timeliness - who a task is coming from, how it relates to your goals, whether you usually snooze similar tasks, how it relates to the work you’ve previously completed, and so on.
But for now, these three criteria—novelty, relevance, timeliness—form the foundation for how we think about task quality. They drive our product design and inform the AI that helps users cut through the noise and focus on what matters.
The three productivity loops we all share
Productivity at work isn't constant - it’s the combined output of a few crucial moments, each of which can determine whether your day stays on track. These are:
Framing: Pulling together and prioritizing all your tasks for the day.
Activating: Jump-starting yourself to get the energy you need to get moving (coffee?).
Triaging: Ongoing re-prioritization as new tasks come in through the day.
Framing, Activating and Triaging are behavioral transitions, and they carry disproportionate weight in our day. Fail at one and your day becomes noisy, reactive, or paralyzed. Get them right, and even a chaotic workload becomes navigable.
Most productivity tools ignore these moments or treat them as incidental. At Toodo we believe they should be the primary design surface. Below is a bit more detail on each, along with some tips on how to maximize your productivity at each step.
1. Framing: How we collect our tasks for the day
Before you can do meaningful work, you need to figure out what the work is.
This means collecting all your open items - the thoughts you woke up with, tasks buried in your inbox, follow-ups from yesterday’s meetings, sticky notes, unread messages. It's a messy constellation of inputs—and unless you convert it into a prioritized plan, you're operating reactively.
What happens here:
Mental unload from memory and notes
Scanning inboxes, tools, calendars, Slack channels
Building a working plan (even if it's loose or incomplete)
Example: Sasha is a Sales Associate at Salesforce. At 8am she opens her laptop and starts her “sweep.” She checks flagged emails, unread DMs, and yesterday’s notes. She pulls all action items into one place and rough-sorts them: high-priority deliverables at the top, everything else below the line. She identifies three “must-move” tasks and two dependencies she needs to unblock. By 9am, she’s clear on what matters today—and what can wait.
Why this moment matters: Without this step, you're outsourcing your agenda to the most recent notification. Framing creates intentionality and focus.
Fun Sasha fact: Sasha is so efficient at drafting her to-do list that she writes it with both hands at once :-)
2. Activating: Plucking up the courage to start the day
The hardest part of work isn’t working - it’s getting started.
Even after you’ve framed the day, there’s a psychological barrier to doing the first real thing. Most people instinctively reach for ritual (ie your fist cup of coffee) and then easy, high-velocity tasks. And there’s nothing wrong with that - items you can knock out quickly help generate forward motion, and give our brains a dopamine kick that makes us feel positive about what we’re doing.
What happens here:
Seeking low-friction wins to build momentum.
Avoiding emotionally heavy or cognitively demanding work.
Reassuring yourself that progress is possible today.
Example: Jared starts his day with two simple tasks: logging expenses from a team offsite and approving a vendor invoice. Then he sends a quick Slack reminder about a deadline. None of it is high impact - but now he’s in motion. By 10am, he’s transitioned into drafting a proposal that he’s been avoiding for a week. It still takes effort, but the warm-up makes it feel less like a wall and more like a ramp.
Why this moment matters: Most systems assume that people just “get to it.” In reality, getting started is its own phase - one that needs to be designed for and supported. At Toodo, our algorithm quickly learns the types of tasks you prefer getting started with, to help ease you into every day.
Fun Jared Fact: Jared’s laptop is the size of a regular desktop computer. This lets him get in some mild strength training while he’s walking between meetings.
3. Triaging: Staying focused on the right stuff in a noisy environment
Even the best-laid plans don’t survive contact with the average workday.
New tasks emerge constantly - in meetings, DMs, inboxes, drive-by conversations. The challenge isn’t just capturing them, but integrating them into your current priorities without derailing your day. Knowing what to sacrifice and compromise is the essential value a knowledge worker provides, and a dynamic, multidimensional calculation we are all performing constantly in our brains.
What happens here:
Real-time capture of new tasks or commitments
On-the-fly prioritization, whether or not we’re conscious of it: “Do now, later, or delegate?”
Continuous recalibration against your original focus for the day.
Example: Anna spends the first half of her day focused on a product roadmap draft. Then a leadership sync throws a wrench into her plans: a bug affecting a key client needs investigation today. She captures that task on the spot, pauses to reprioritize, and moves one of her roadmap items to tomorrow, with the slightest of sighs.
Why this moment matters: Triaging well means you can be flexible to emerging and real business needs, without losing control of your focus or getting mentally fried.
Fun Anna fact: We think the Anna in this image might actually be Lucille Bluth.
5 Types of To-doers
Everyone creates to-do lists - whether physical, digital or in their heads. How people build, manage and act on those lists, though, is highly diverse - everyone has a slightly different style.
Everyone creates to-do lists - whether physical, digital or in their heads. How people build, manage and act on those lists, though, is highly diverse - everyone has a slightly different style.
At Toodo, we've conducted hundreds of interviews over the last few months, to understand how to best build an AI-powered system that adapts to the way you work, rather than the way you think you’re supposed to work. Here are five of the most common "to-do list personas" we've encountered, and a few thoughts on how each one can level up.
1. The Planner, Interrupted: Intentional but sometimes overcome
Alice starts every day with a clean list. Maybe it’s scribbled in a notebook, maybe it's a carefully organized app. Either way, there’s a strong sense of ritual: she takes time to map out her priorities.
But then the day happens. Incoming emails, Slack messages, last-minute meetings. Her neat list quickly becomes an afterthought, as urgent new demands pile up. By the end of the day, she’s reacted to everything except the items she originally set out to tackle.
Key Challenge: Reality rarely cooperates with plans.
How to Improve: Build flexibility into your daily list. Identify 2–3 true "must-dos" and treat the rest as optional. Use real-time reprioritization (something AI can assist with) to adjust as your day evolves, not just before it starts.
2. The Over-Engineer: Planner, procrastinator?
Lars has a system. Not just any system—an intricate one. Nested lists. Color coding. Tags for tags. Maybe even a separate "plan to make a plan" document.
In fact, Lars spends more time designing workflows than actually completing tasks. It's easy to fall into the trap of confusing the management of work with the doing of work.
Key Challenge: Optimizing productivity becomes a form of avoidance.
How to Improve: Resist the urge to overcomplicate. Set a maximum planning time (say, 10 minutes) at the start of each day. After that, it's execution time. Let your tools handle the complexity behind the scenes so you can stay focused.
3. The Task Hopper: Knocking Out quick wins
You know this person—maybe you are this person. They open their to-do list and scan for something quick to cross off. Email a client? Sure. Update a spreadsheet? Done. But that big strategic project? That critical presentation? Those get pushed to "later" again and again.
Small wins feel good (and provide a hit of dopamine), but consistently avoiding hard work creates a long-term drag on progress.
Key Challenge: Favoring comfort tasks over impact tasks.
How to Improve: Reframe how you define a “win.” The most valuable tasks are often the least immediately gratifying. AI-based tools can help surface "high-leverage" tasks at the right moments—nudging you to tackle what matters, not just what’s easy.
4. The Cleaner: Take stock, tidy up
Alex knows he has a few precious hours to get stuff done. He has a long, disordered list, but needs some time to take stock of it. After that, it needs tidying (checking off tasks are already done or no longer relevant), new tasks need to be added before they’re forgotten, and what’s left needs to be assigned a priority, deadline, level of urgency etc. Only then - once everything has been neatly ordered, does his brain have space for work to begin.
Key Challenge: Finding the mental space to dig in and get stuff done.
How to Improve: Find ways to be more comfortable knocking tasks off the list, without needing to order the system in its entirety before work starts. Tools like Toodo can help with this; holding and ordering information for you so you can start work without worrying that stuff will slip through the cracks.
5. The Firefighter: Living (and dying) by urgency
For the Firefighter, every day is a triage unit. They spend their time putting out the biggest fires—chasing deadlines, responding to emergencies, moving from one urgent task to the next.
The deeper work? It never gets scheduled, because the schedule is set by the latest crisis. This can feel thrilling for a while, but it's an exhausting and ultimately unsustainable way to operate.
Key Challenge: Living reactively instead of strategically.
How to Improve: Build protected time blocks into your calendar for proactive work, not just reactive work. An intelligent system can help you distinguish between "urgent" and "important," and defend your focus when it matters most.
Why understanding your to-do List personality matters
Most productivity advice assumes one-size-fits-all solutions. But different people (and different days) call for different strategies. Recognizing your natural tendencies - whether it's overplanning, procrastinating, firefighting, or all of the above - is the first step toward building a system that works for you.
This is why we built Toodo. Our AI learns how you work best and adapts your task management around it. Not just by reminding you what you said you wanted to do, but by helping you course-correct in real time when reality inevitably intrudes.
The goal isn’t the perfect list. It’s meaningful progress, every day.
Why Toodo?
The way we manage and prioritize our to-do lists has changed very little in the last few thousand years. You wake up, think about what you need to do, write it down (on some paper, or a post-it, or a Google doc), and then struggle through the day trying to get it done, all the while being assailed by demands from co-workers, or clients, or noisy apps.
Execs in boardrooms and struggling musicians in bedrooms both scribble stuff down, try and fail to do it all, then try again tomorrow.
In the next few years things will change - the AI systems that help us generate images or search for answers will also revolutionize the way we prioritize and get our work done. That’s what we’re interested in.
Both of us care a lot about people - helping people get things done, and improving the systems that let them do that. We’ve done that in the physical world, working out the most efficient ways to route people or packages at Amazon and Uber. And we’ve done it in the world of work; helping people find new jobs and opportunities at places like LinkedIn.
With Toodo, we’re building a platform where AI can pull in all of the work you have to get done - from your emails, Slack, physical notes, whatever - work with you to prioritize it, and free you up to focus on what’s most important. Nothing gets lost, there’s always enough time, and instead of waking up every day to a blank piece of paper, you get a head-start on doing what matters.
58% of knowledge work is “work about work” - meetings, alignment, prioritization. Time spent being creative with colleague, or setting a new direction for a team or business, is essential. Time spent updating GANTTs, or mapping dependencies, is tedious.
With Toodo, we want to let you hand off the mundane stuff, and focus on what matters.
Ben & Mark