Task Compass: Smart To Do

Task Compass will help you if:

• You use Apple Reminders as your to-do list.
• You find it challenging to keep your lists prioritized.
• You feel overwhelmed by long lists.
• You know what’s important but find it hard to get started.

This app probably isn’t for you if:

• You don’t use to-do lists.
• You need complex project management features like dependencies or detailed time tracking.

A long list of tasks tires you out. Your brain gets overwhelmed, and it’s nearly impossible to decide what to tackle first.

Trying to rate tasks from 1 to 10 often fails—you end up giving several items the same score. The problem isn’t you; it’s that our brains aren’t built to assign absolute importance to a long list of items.

Instead of asking you to assign priorities or ratings, it asks you to make one choice at a time: “Which is more important: Task A or Task B?”

This works because:

• It feels natural. You’re good at comparing two things directly.
• It saves mental energy. You only have to think about the two tasks in front of you, not the entire list.
• It works with you. The app takes your simple, “good enough” choices and uses them to build a clear, optimized priority list for you.

This is a classic problem. You know something is a top priority, but you find yourself doing other, less important things instead. This happens when you feel a sense of resistance or “friction” towards a task. Knowing something is important doesn’t always give you the energy to start it.

Other apps make you manually tag tasks when you feel resistance. Task Compass is smarter: it learns from your actions. It notices when an important task sits on your list for days while you complete other, less important ones.

When it sees this pattern, it recognizes that you’re avoiding the task. It then combines what you’ve told it is important with what it sees you doing to help you get unstuck.

1. You make your choices. Just answer a few “A or B” questions. The app’s algorithm figures out your top priorities.
2. Your #1 priority is now clear, you can focus on that one task.
3. Stuckness gets flagged. The app notices when you’re avoiding an important task and highlights it with a mountain icon. The app makes resistance visible, and you decide what to do about it.

Yes. Task Compass integrates directly with Apple Reminders. All your existing tasks and lists sync automatically, so you don’t have to migrate any data or manage two different systems.

You can reassess a task. The app will ask you to re-compare it against other tasks.

You might find that the need to reassess isn’t frequent. Urgency can change quickly, but importance is more stable than urgency.

It’s inspired by it, but with a twist. The traditional Eisenhower Matrix uses importance vs urgency. Task Compass uses importance vs resistance as the matrix dimensions.

There is no AI in Task Compass. It runs on old-school textbook computer science.

Yes. GTD is a flexible method, and you can use the default Reminders list as your inbox, and other lists as GTD contexts.

Unfortunately Task Compass has no access to other Reminders features like flags and tags, based on a technical decision on part of Apple.

Task Compass tends to ignore urgency as a factor.

This opinionated approach prefers making progress on important tasks, at the potential cost of unimportant tasks falling through.

However, in The Shortlist mode, you can assign Reminders to a specific day (today, tomorrow, or a custom date), and that will cause the Reminder to appear on your Shortlist on that day, signaling potential urgency: “this has to be done today”.

Apple Reminders approach is radically simplified: all tasks are presumed to be 1-day things, which you assign to the day when you intend to make them.

There’s no specific mechanism for Task Compass to handle deadlines, other than assigning Reminders to a specific day. This limitation comes from Apple Reminders, which also don’t have a way of handling deadlines.