Using Leantime's AI Task Prioritization: Using best practices and sentiment to overcome decision fatigue

Created by Marcel Folaron,
Last Updated: 27 Oct 2023 at 03:47 PM by Marcel Folaron

Have you ever sat in front of a list of tasks and thought, "What am I supposed to do right now?" or "ugh, I don't know what to start on."

If you're like me, and you have ADHD, sometimes that feeling then turns into "wellllll, let's just do nothing then." or worse, "let's do everything!" as I jump through my incessant amount of tabs; doing a little bit with each one.

As humans, we spend so much time making decisions. All day, every day, and it can get so overwhelming that, by dinner, we might have decision fatigue. Don't ask me how many times I consider not eating at all because I'm just done. 

Figuring out what to start working on next doesn't have to be part of the problem anymore. 

What is AI driven Task Prioritization?

Our AI Task recommendations have a layered approach. 

Initial and primary prioritization uses 3 productivity principles to determine the best order in which to start tasks in. It'll prioritize your most immediately due tasks within that week (up to 10 of them).

Prioritization Principles

**Pareto Principle**

The Pareto principle is a theory that 20% of the input will account for 80% of the output.  The goal of this principle in business is to 

**Goldilocks Rule**

 The Goldilocks rule is about finding the "just right" tasks based on scope, time, cost, and quality factors to meet the project objectives.  

The principle here, applied to an individual's productivity, is recognizing the concept that the "just right" level that challenges our skills and interests is a task that will boost productivity, our interest, and our learnings. It's about finding the "manageable difficulty"

**Task Pairing** : Start with small, the move to large

In research, there are mixed thoughts on how to best pair tasks. Some lines of thinking will say start big and others say start small, build to big; often calling out the risk that when you start small, you may bias to doing the small tasks and never get to the big ones.

For someone with ADHD, though, the hardest part can be getting the executive function to just start. So in this situation, we lean into Newton's 1st Law of Productivity. 

Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Objects at rest tend to stay in rest.

By pairing 1-2 smaller tasks with 1 larger task, we start human motion. 

So how does the AI choose?

The AI decides based on context of the tasks the person has to choose which principle, and then using the chosen one to organize the tasks and giving us the specific one it used as an output as well.

How to Use Leantime's AI Task Prioritization

Task prioritization is meant for the individual's experience in managing their tasks. This will be done in the user "Home" screen, which can be found by the small house at the top right of the navigation menu. 



When you're on this screen, you'll find that this page is meant that organize your personal work across the projects.



From there, you'll click on the "Prioritize My To-Dos." As it loads, AI will be prioritizing your tasks based on these principles in the background. 



Once your list has been prioritized, your top three tasks will be highlighted in the color of their priority. Clicking the "Show more" button will show the other 7 tasks that have been prioritized in this list as seen in the image below.



If your list has been prioritized, you won't be able to group or sort your to dos of this week in any other format. If you need to go back to grouping or prioritizing in another fashion, simply click the "Show AI prioritized list" toggle to turn it off and you'll have full control over your list items again.

The Next Phase of Task Prioritization

The next phase of task prioritization for us will be about you and how you feel about the tasks you're assigned to. You'll have the ability to privately rate your feelings about a task (we recommend doing this before you start it) based on the title, description, or whatever you know about it. 

Be honest. Only the AI knows how you feel about the work tasks.

The more you rate your tasks, the better the AI will get at making recommendations for pairings of your tasks and to optimize around that. 

This can be a technique that's often used in the ADHD community; a more "real life" example could be: You love to make youtube videos but you hate to clean your kitchen. So you make your youtube videos in the kitchen so you're forced to clean the kitchen before you make a video.

Why else is this useful?

Doing the work you like to do

We believe, and studies support, that people are happier at work when they are working on things they enjoy to do -- and right now, if you're working somewhere that assigns tasks to you -- tasks are likely being assigned to you more arbitrarily and often based solely on capacity, scope, sprint priority, or effort and often, not by looking at what you'd like to do, would like to learn, or would benefit from doing. 

In the future, our AI can make smart recommendations around task assignments (without sharing your personal feelings) and resource distribution. 

The goal here being to help you enjoy what you're doing more.

What if I'm assigning my tasks to myself?

In this case, you could be a lead or an entrepreneur. In either case, our goal is to help you start to recognize where your strengths and passions are. 

Knowing those things and seeing those trends are the things you'll need to know to be able to properly delegate out. 

As a founder, in particular, you are already wearing multiple hats and you will be faster and quicker working on the things you love, enjoy, and are stronger in.  From there, you'll have better relevant information to make smarter first hires as you work to fill out those skill gaps. Smarter first hires just increases the likelihood of your success.

To learn more about the other features we have or for additional questions:

Visit our features page or reach out to us at support@leantime.io

Updated on: 28/05/2024