Tasks

Our lists are the place for all your tasks and to-dos – they remember everything that needs to be done, freeing up your mental space to focus on other things.

Lunatask comes with a unique way of prioritizing your tasks, guiding you to finish already started tasks before taking on new work or towards older tasks instead of newer ones. It's just as simple.

Additionally, there are built-in battle-tested productivity techniques, such as Must/Should/Want method, Eisenhower matrix, work-in-progress limit, and others to keep you organized and productive. Timers are also here to help you get started with the task at hand.

Why reinvent a to-do list?

As human beings, we often struggle with prioritization. Let's face it, we avoid difficult tasks, and we may not always follow through on tasks that we have already started.

Unfortunately, to-do apps often do not provide the necessary tools to address these issues effectively. Instead, they leave it up to you, which can lead to a sense of failure. We believe a to-do app should guide you so no task is left behind.

Methodology

When you open Lunatask for the first time, you might be surprised by the missing ability to drag tasks manually around to move them up or down. This is because lists in Lunatask automatically sort your tasks, so the list is always prioritized. We do this by calculating urgency for each of your tasks.

While new tasks arrive at the bottom of the list, one is checking off older tasks on the top. The "first-in, first-out" approach maximizes throughput and makes sure no task is left behind. This leads to feeling better when there's a lot on your plate, even if you are usually a disorganized person.

You can tell Lunatask which tasks are important to you by changing their priority. You also pick which tasks are for now and which for later. This is how our Now / Later workflow works. There are also other workflows, like Must/Should/Want method.

One of our users said about this:

My initial impressions of it were that it was very frustrating ("This is stupid! Why can't I drag tasks!"), but then, once the concept behind it clicked, it was a real a-ha moment – most apps are designed with neurotypical users in mind, which is not really something that was obvious to me until I tried Lunatask.

Different workflows

A workflow is a specific productivity technique you pick for each of your task lists and it affects mainly how your tasks are grouped together. There are a few workflows to choose from:

• Now / Later
• Kanban
• Must/Should/Want method
• Eisenhower method
• Review old tasks

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You can switch between workflows freely — not like in other apps where after changing the structure of the task list, you cannot easily get back to the original state. The section where the task belongs in the current workflow is always calculated from its properties — no information is lost when switching between workflows.

In Now / Later workflow or Kanban workflow, you pick your next tasks by changing their status to Next.

Regardless of what workflow you pick for each list, there will always be at least two visually separated groups of tasks — your backlog of candidates to work on later (usually called Later) and your next tasks.

Usually, you will have only a handful of tasks planned to work on next, and you will periodically review your later tasks. It is okay if you have a lot of tasks there.

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In all workflows, you move tasks between sections in the list by updating their properties like status or motivation.

One of our users said about this:

It's amazing that despite having ADHD and a to-do list of 100 tasks, it is not a mess. Incredible!

Prioritization

Unlike other to-do apps, Lunatask automatically prioritized tasks for you. In this section, we will delve more deeply into how this works.

What is urgency?

The urgency is a set of rules like these that govern the order of tasks in the list. You can think of urgency as a score given to each task – the higher the score, the more urgent the task is, and the higher it appears in the list.

• Tasks marked as Started have a higher urgency than tasks in Next to nudge you to finish what you already started before taking on new work and are shown higher in the list
• Waiting tasks are not actionable, hence they have a low urgency (lower than tasks in Next, but usually higher than tasks in Later) and are shown less prominently in the list
• Higher priority usually means higher urgency as well (but not always, see nuanced usage section below)
• Using the priority, you can nudge the algorithm so it knows what is important to you – if something is important, tell that to Lunatask by raising the task's priority

If a new task should be done before an older one, it means it has a higher priority. Assign a higher priority to the new task to make it appear higher in the list. This can be done using the priority picker in the task detail, using the right-click context menu, or via Shift+Arrow Up keyboard shortcut.

If two tasks have the same properties like status, motivation, Eisenhower value, priority, or estimate, the older one is always considered more urgent, causing new tasks to appear at the bottom of the list while bubbling up as they get older.

See our dedicated articles for how it works in detail in each workflow.

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The task with the highest urgency will be highlighted in bold in the list as the next task to work on. This can be disabled in the settings.

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At any time, you can reset a task's age in the right-click context menu. This can come in handy when organizing tasks that have been pending for a long time and you don't want them to be automatically prioritized at the top of the list and instead treat them as created today.

So, you replaced the manual ordering of tasks with 5 priorities?

Yes, that's the simple way to say it. When you start manually dragging tasks around, you usually lose the sense of how old the task is. Using priorities, you have a way of saying that a certain task is more important than another while still allowing for more things to be taken into account (like their age or status).

Is this perfect?

Of course, this gets in a way sometimes. However, people tend to, for example, avoid complex tasks and procrastinate on easy ones while challenging tasks get stuck for several days (we were indeed guilty of that in the past). So while the algorithm might not be perfect at prioritizing tasks, humans (and especially those with ADHD) sometimes are not either.

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Fortunately, the suggested order is just a recommendation. You can always get the tasks done in any order you like. Lunatask will just make sure to push tasks to a more prominent place higher in the list as they get older or are left unfinished to remind you of them, so no task is left behind.

Scheduling

Lunatask supports both date-based scheduling and time blocking. When the task is happening in the future, in a few days or next month, you can schedule it for that day or the day before using date-based scheduling. When the date comes, you can plan it into your day using time blocking.

So, date-based scheduling is useful for tasks happening later in the future, and time blocking is for today's or tomorrow's tasks. See our dedicated articles describing each method for more detail.

Integrations

We offer powerful integrations allowing you to create tasks on various platforms or sync them into Lunatask from other apps and services. Here are a few examples of what our integrations can do:

• Save emails and conversations by forwarding them into Lunatask with our email integration
• Create a widget on your iOS home screen to quickly create new tasks on the go
• Create new tasks by talking to Siri or Google Assistant on your mobile devices, including Apple Watch and Homepod
• Save web pages and articles to read later using our browser bookmarklet
• Build powerful automations using Shortcuts on iOS and Mac or connect to 5,000+ apps and services using Zapier automation platform

Nuanced priority usage (advanced)

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If you are just starting out with Lunatask, feel free to skip this section.

Higher priority does not always mean the task should always be done before other tasks with lower priority.

Imagine a case when you have only one Started task in the list. Now, a new more important task is added to Next. Assigning the highest priority will now make the task in Next more urgent than the task in Started, hence it appears on top of the list in Now / Later workflow, and it will be highlighted as the next task to work on.

Assigning the priority of High to the task in Next won't have the same effect. You can use the priority of High to sort your next tasks to work on after you finish the work you already started.

Similarly, this can be applied to Low and Lowest priorities. Assigning a lower priority to a task in Started means putting it on hold for a while.

See the table below for the exact order of rules in groupings based on task status (higher in the list means more urgent).

Status	Priority
Due	Highest
Started	Highest
Next	Highest
Due	High
Due	Normal
Started	High
Started	Normal
Next	High
Next	Normal
Due	Low
Started	Low
Next	Low
Due	Lowest
Started	Lowest
Next	Lowest
Waiting	Highest
Waiting	High
Waiting	Normal
Later	Highest
Later	High
Later	Normal
Waiting	Low
Waiting	Lowest
Later	Low
Later	Lowest

And here for By motivation grouping:

Motivation	Priority
Due	Highest
Must	Highest
Should	Highest
Want	Highest
Due	High
Due	Normal
Must	High
Must	Normal
Should	High
Should	Normal
Want	High
Want	Normal
Due	Low
Must	Low
Should	Low
Want	Low
Due	Lowest
Must	Lowest
Should	Lowest
Want	Lowest
Unknown	Highest
Unknown	High
Unknown	Normal
Unknown	Low
Unknown	Lowest