SFORA🤔 What is this?
System for Organizing Ranked Activities
About SFORA
🎯 What is this tool?
This tool helps you objectively prioritize large lists of tasks by comparing them two at a time. Perfect for planning work across quarters when you need to determine which tasks are truly most critical.
✨ Why use it?
Instead of overwhelming traditional ranking, this tool breaks prioritization into simple pairwise choices. It reduces bias and helps you arrive at clear, objective task rankings - no more guessing which 20 tasks are most critical from your list of 80!
🚀 How to get started?
- Export your tasks: Get your tasks into a CSV file from tools like ClickUp, including Task ID, Name, and Description columns 🤔 How do I do that?
- Upload and configure: Upload your CSV and map the columns to help the tool understand your data
- Start comparing: Click on the more important task in each pair presented to you
- Export results: Download your fully prioritized task list with rankings
📊 How do I export tasks from ClickUp?
- Create a list view in ClickUp
- Apply the filters you want (filter out tasks with very hard start dates, tasks that are already done/abandoned, etc.)
- Go to "Customize" → "Export view"
- Select all columns and CSV format
- Download the CSV file
🧠The Smart Sorting
The tool uses binary insertion sort - a clever algorithm that doesn't require you to compare every task against every other task. Instead, it uses your comparisons to intelligently place tasks in their correct positions, making the process efficient even with large task lists.
When the algorithm tries to find the right place for a task, each comparison you make helps it get closer to the correct position. It starts by finding the task in the middle of the already-sorted list and compares it to the task it's trying to place. Then, depending on the outcome of the comparison, it narrows down where to search: if the new task has higher priority than the middle one, it focuses on the higher-priority half of the list. If it has lower priority, it focuses on the lower-priority half. It keeps finding the middle task and comparing until there's only one spot left where the task belongs. Then it moves on to the next unsorted task.
Want to see it explained visually? See the video below.
🔧 Additional Options
For advanced users or testing purposes, you can access additional debug features and options
by adding ?debug=true to the URL: Loading...
1. Select your CSV file
Please select columns for your task data:
Which task is more important?
🤔 When to use "Equal Priority"?
Only use this when you would be happy with a coin toss deciding which task to do first.
Equal priority should be a very rare occurrence - most tasks can be meaningfully differentiated when you think about:
- Which would you tackle first if you had to choose?
- Which has more impact on your goals?
- Which is more time-sensitive?
- Which unblocks other important work?
Priority correlation: Tasks that need to be handled soon should only be tied extremely rarely. It's more acceptable to have tied tasks that you're planning to tackle next year.