Priority Matrix – Organize Your Life
Grappling with a spiraling list of things to do? Try something radical: get rid of the list.
Productivity apps are one of the most popular categories in the market, and the field is crowded with contenders jockeying for the precious storage space on your iPhone or iPad. They range from simple, elegant list apps to complicated systems that promise to organize every task, project and deadline in your life.
“Priority Matrix” sits somewhere in the middle, offering a visual approach to managing your time-based on a time-tested method.
What’s the App?
Dveloped by Appfluence and available for iPhone for $5, Priority Matix helps you juggle tasks and projects by setting priorities based on a number of criteria. The big selling point is its ability to tell you what you need to do today and this week across all projects, responsibilities and tasks, making it easy to track and share goals.
The app follows the method set forth by Stephen Covey, the organizational and productivity guru who wrote the landmark business and self-help bestseller “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” Covey, who died earlier this year, popularized the idea of the “priority matrix,” which organizes tasks along two different axes: one is time urgency and one is importance to your mission and purpose in life.
Tasks in the app are therefore sorted into four quadrants: critical in mission and urgent in time sensitivity; critical but not in need of immediate attention; not critical but urgent, such as bills to be paid; and low-importance, low-priority tasks. The app organizes these quadrants into sections on a grid. You can then resize each quadrant, making it easy to attach each tasks to each section.
Entering a task is easy: you simply tap on a quadrant and enter the information, customizing it with as little or as much detail as you need, including due dates, start dates, recurring frequency, icons, notes, and completion percentage. You can buy Priority Matrix for other platforms such as desktop Macs and Windows, which can sync in the cloud to keep everything organized between different work environments.
The app can also send family and colleagues e-mails about tasks’ progress, and there’s a large degree of customization with the ability to attach icons to tasks and change colors in the app.
You’ll Want It If…
If you’re a productivity geek or just an organizational enthusiast who wants something that goes beyond the standard list format. Priority Matrix will really appeal to visually oriented types: there’s a lot of opportunity for customization. And, it is fun to add icons to tasks to make them more eye-catching: adding a burning fire, for instance, to a mission-critical task makes priorities jump out you on an intuitive level.
It’s Not My Thing, What Else Ya Got?
Priority Matrix is a great idea for those willing to try something different beyond checklists, but some users might find the navigation a bit difficult to use. The look and feel are stripped down and simple, and while it helps keep the grid quadrant system front and center, it may be too bare bones and unfamiliar for many users.
The use of the grid format is one of its unique strengths, but also a potential limitation for some users: the iPhone version is fairly cramped and it’s hard to get a view of the entire system at once. You may want to consider the more spacious iPad version if possible, which takes good advantage of the larger display.
And some may ultimately find it hard to let go of the classic list-making format. Those who want a list-format task organization app that still has flair and panache, might be better off with the Clear app, which combines the simplicity and elegance of a list with a rare visual elegance and flair.
