u/dkf2112

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.

Our group lost 20 minutes every game night to "what should we play?" so we built a small system.

How it works:

- Everyone starts with 1 vote, and each person nominates a game.
- We vote; ties are settled by a coin flip. We play whatever wins.
- The winner's owner drops to 0 votes. Everyone whose game wasn't picked gains +1.
- So if your pick keeps losing, your vote weight keeps climbing until your game finally wins.

Two wrinkles we added once we'd lived with it:

- Votes are tracked per group. The three-player pool is separate from the four- or five-player nights, so your standing depends on who you're actually playing with that evening.
- Short games get their own flag, so a 30-minute filler doesn't compete with a 3-hour epic. Your vote weight tracks separately for short vs. regular games.

The effect is a self-balancing queue. Nobody gets steamrolled by the loudest voice or the group's default favorite, and over a few sessions everyone's pick eventually gets played.

Does anyone else run something like this? Weighted voting, a rotating "chooser of the night," a shortlist you draw from, or do you just wing it every time?