Most advice on how to prioritize tasks asks you to sort your own list: draw an Eisenhower matrix, pick your top three, eat the frog. In Gnothi, the app I built, you skip that step. You throw everything at it in whatever order it comes out, and Claude, connected over MCP, scores each item and tells you what to do next, when, and why.
I think of it as Pareto: the most value for the least time. Described in the abstract, it sounds like every other "AI to-do list." Every time I've shown a friend a real example, their eyes lit up.
It's Tuesday, 9:04 pm. You open Claude and say all of this in one breath:
Pay the electric bill, it's due tomorrow. Car registration's due the 5th. I keep meaning to cancel that streaming thing I never watch, it's like 15 a month. Sam asked about the camping weekend, I need to get back to him. Call the dentist for a cleaning. Book Thanksgiving flights, make that due the 10th. I'm waiting on the contractor's quote for the deck, he said Monday. Start Spanish again. And hang that shelf in the hallway.
Claude files each one as a to-do and judges it, which means writing a few short keys onto the item:
v: 1 to 5, what doing it is worth: its stakes times the chance it pays off.min: how many minutes it takes, snapped to 5, 15, 30, 60, 120 or 240.needs: what it takes beyond a phone: a computer, a call, going out, or business hours.after: the first day it can be done.Here's what it writes, and the order you get back.
| # | To-do | Keys Claude writes | Score | Why it's here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pay the electric bill | v:3 min:5 needs:computer, due tomorrow | first list | Due by tomorrow, so it skips scoring |
| 2 | Renew car registration | v:3 min:15 needs:computer, due Nov 5, #urgent | first list | A late fee and an unregistered car, inside two weeks |
| 3 | Reply to Sam about camping | v:3 min:5 | 156 | A person is waiting, and it takes five minutes |
| 4 | Hang the hallway shelf | v:2 min:30 | 64 | Its area has gone quiet, so it gets a turn |
| 5 | Cancel the streaming subscription | v:2 min:5 needs:computer | 52 | $15 a month, every month, for five minutes |
| 6 | Book Thanksgiving flights | v:2 min:30 needs:computer, due Nov 10 | 21 | Due the 10th, still two weeks out |
| 7 | Start Spanish again | v:2 min:60 | 15 | Worth it, but slow, and it never gets more urgent |
| Call the dentist | v:2 min:15 needs:call,hours | hidden | It's 9 pm | |
| Contractor's deck quote | after:2026-11-02 | hidden | Nothing to do until Monday |
The numbers are illustrative: I picked the keys the way the rules below say Claude should, and computed the scores from the real formula.
The bill and the registration skip the math. Anything overdue, due by tomorrow, or tagged #pinned or #urgent goes on a first list, ordered by date, ahead of every score. The bill is due tomorrow. The registration isn't, but missing it means a late fee and a car you can't legally drive, which Claude rates v:3, and the date is inside two weeks, so Claude tags it #urgent. That tag has a strict rule: it goes only on something where waiting costs something real that acting soon avoids. For a date inside two weeks, that's a fee, interest, a lost right or a broken promise worth v:3 or more. "It has a date" isn't enough. About five #urgent items across your whole board is a ceiling, not a quota. A calm week has none.
Sam outranks the flights. A person waiting on you is a 3 on the scale, the same as roughly $100 a month at stake, so it's worth three times the flights' 2. It also takes five minutes to the flights' thirty. Together that's 156 against 21.
The five-minute cancel jumps ahead of Spanish. The subscription only bleeds $15 a month, but the cancel takes five minutes and the money stops for good. Spanish has the same v:2 but takes an hour. 52 against 15.
The dentist disappears at 9 pm. It needs a phone call during business hours. Gnothi treats business hours as Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, and calls or errands as 8 am to 9 pm, so at 9:04 pm on a Tuesday the dentist is held back. At 10 am Wednesday, with a score of 30, it shows up ahead of the flights and Spanish. The same goes for what you're carrying: say you're on your phone, and the computer items drop out until you're at a desk.
The deck quote is gone until Monday. You're waiting on the contractor, so there's nothing to do. after: hides the item, and everything under it, until that day. It won't nag you at every check-in, and on Monday it's back.
The flights creep up. You asked for the 10th as a due date, so Claude keeps it, but missing it costs nothing real, so it gets no #urgent. Instead its score climbs as the date gets closer:
| Days until the 10th | Score |
|---|---|
| 14 or more | 21 |
| 10 | 27 |
| 7 | 32 |
| 3 | 38 |
| 2 | 39 |
| 1 | first list |
At a week out it has passed the dentist call's 30. The day before, it moves to the first list, where the bill started. Had you said "sometime before the 10th," Claude would have written target: instead, a softer lift covered below that never reaches the first list: 21 now, about 27 on the day.
The shelf gets a turn. The shelf lives in a House field you set to weekly, where a couple of older jobs have sat untouched for about two and a half weeks. Gnothi measures how long a field has gone quiet against its own cadence, and gives the most neglected areas a temporary lift so one part of your life doesn't starve while another hogs the top. Here that lift is ×3, which takes the shelf from 21 to 64. The lift only covers a field's first three items, and the two most neglected fields, and it shrinks as you get things done there.
It's a Thursday in early November, and three things all feel like today:
My car insurance renewed $95 a month higher, and I've got a quote from another company at the old price. Ben's startup wants a proposal for their new site, $3,000, if I get it to him by the 25th. And there's a $90 double charge on my card I have to dispute before the window closes on the 29th.
The dispute has a hard date and a right you lose after it, the insurance bleeds money, and the proposal has the biggest number you've seen all month. Claude puts the insurance first and the dispute last.
| To-do | Size × chance | Keys | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Switch car insurance | $95 a month × 1 = $95 | v:3 min:30 | 64 |
| Send Ben the proposal | $3,000 ÷ 12 = $250 a month, × 0.5 = $125 | v:3 min:120, due Nov 25 | 32 |
| Dispute the $90 charge | $90 ÷ 12 = $7.50 a month, × 0.5 = $3.75 | v:1 min:15, due Nov 29 | 10 |
The $3,000 shrinks. A one-time amount counts a twelfth, so $3,000 is $250 a month. It also only pays if Ben says yes, which halves it to $125. That's the same v:3 as the insurance, and from there the minutes decide: two hours against thirty, so the proposal scores half.
The insurance bleeds. The quote is in hand, so buying the policy locks the saving in, which makes its chance 1. Every week it waits costs about $22. A bleed needs v:4 to earn #urgent, so this one competes on score, and wins.
The dispute goes last, and it's still safe. A hard deadline outranks a bleed only when missing it costs at least what the bleed does. Missing this one costs $90 once, and the refund still depends on the bank saying yes: $3.75 a month against $95 a month. That's too small for #urgent as well, which a missed date earns only at v:3 or more. It still won't pass unnoticed: after the 15th its due date starts lifting its score, to about 19 two days out, and the day before it's due it moves to the first list.
The proposal gets a stronger push. A v:3 opportunity closing within two weeks earns #urgent, so on the 11th it moves to the first list. A week of waiting costs the insurance about $22 and costs the other two nothing, as long as each is done by its date.
You never read that table. In the app, your home list shows anything you've #pinned, then the top three, then a 📋 Next container with everything else in folders named for the kind of sitting: Calls, Paperwork, a trip. Claude's own work, the research or drafts it does for you, sits apart under 🤖 Claude.
In Claude, you say "check in with me, I've got 20 minutes." Claude opens with its read of your situation in one line, such as "20 minutes, at your desk, Tuesday evening," so you can correct it. Then it offers one step at a time, worth the most for the minutes first, and you answer yes, skip, or later. Items that share a sitting come as one step, lettered, so "yes, not c" settles three of them. It does the prep it can do alone, such as finding the cancel page or drafting the reply to Sam, so the step only asks for your part.
With Cowork, or Claude Pro or Max, you can also schedule a nightly triage that sorts the list while you sleep, and a read-only morning brief. The nightly run judges, ranks and moves items, and checks off finished ones. It deletes nothing but notes it has folded into an item: anything it would delete gets set aside for you to decide. An item changed or deleted by mistake can be restored for about 30 days.
An item's score is:
score = 10 × 3^(v−1) × U × T ÷ √(max(min, 5) ÷ 15)
The score is computed when Claude reads the list and never stored, so it's always current with today's date.
Each step on the v: scale is about three times the stakes of the one below:
| v | Means | Roughly |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Harm now | Health or safety, a security exposure, something people depend on is broken |
| 4 | about $300 a month | |
| 3 | A person waiting on you | about $100 a month |
| 2 | about $30 a month | |
| 1 | Trivial |
Only 5, 3 and 1 have fixed anchors in Gnothi's rules; 4 and 2 follow from "about three times."
To pick v:, Claude places the item on a ladder first: harm now, then hard deadlines about two weeks out, then bleed and owed (money lost every week it waits, or a person waiting), then gain (money that waiting doesn't shrink), then growth, then everything else. Within bleed, gain and growth, size times chance decides. Size is dollars a month, with a one-time amount counting a twelfth. Chance is 1 when doing it locks the result in, 0.5 when it waits on someone else's yes, and 0.1 when it's speculative. A $600 refund you only have to claim is $50 a month at chance 1. The same $600 as a bonus you'd have to ask for is $25 at chance 0.5.
The Eisenhower matrix sorts tasks into four boxes by urgent and important. It has no idea how long anything takes, so a five-minute win and a five-hour project can share a box.
Weighted shortest job first (WSJF), from agile planning, divides cost of delay by job size, which is close to this. Gnothi divides by the square root of the time instead, so short tasks get a boost without trivia taking over: a 5-minute task at v:1 scores 17, while an hour-long task at v:3 scores 45.
The formula is simple. The judgment is in the keys, and Claude writes those. It reads each item and its notes, and puts a number on stakes and minutes the way a good assistant would, and it can be wrong. The score is a sort key, nothing more. Items you've dragged into order stay that way until they change, and anything you've #pinned stays where you put it. Inside one list your order wins, and Claude only moves an item you placed when the ladder clearly says so, such as a deadline coming inside two weeks.
Capturing is the easy half. On an Apple Watch or Wear OS watch, tap Do it and say "dentist appointment 3pm Saturday," and it's on your to-dos, due Saturday, for the next triage to judge. A Claude second brain for to-dos and habits covers the rest of that setup: connecting Claude over MCP, the Workflowy-style outline, and the watch.