User Manual

Everything you need to know about Sortomate — from your first task to your daily workflow.

Quick Start

New to Sortomate? You can be up and running in under two minutes.

1. Open the app and tap the + button — the floating button, or the + in the side rail on wider screens. A New Task sheet slides up.

2. Type what needs to be done in the Task field — a single line describing the task.

3. Rate it on three factors. Each has five tap-cells, top = strongest:

   Factor	Top (1)	Bottom (5)
   Importance	Critical	Trivial
   Due within	Today	Someday
   Effort	Minutes	Months

   Scoring is optional — you can skip it and score the task later.

4. Tap Add. The task lands in your ranked list.

5. Look at the top of the list. That is your next action.

That is the full loop. The sections below explain the details.

How scoring works

Sortomate ranks every task using a single transparent formula:

rating = 4 × (6 − importance)² / (urgency × effort)

Each factor is an integer from 1 (strongest) to 5 (weakest). A higher rating means higher priority. The maximum rating is 100, which a task scored Critical / Today / Minutes achieves.

• Importance is squared, so it dominates the ranking. A critical task outranks a high-importance one by a wide margin, even when urgency and effort are equal.
• Urgency reflects how soon the window closes, not a deadline date. There are no due dates in Sortomate — only urgency windows (Today → Someday).
• Effort acts as a divider: quick tasks (Minutes) score higher than equivalent long ones (Months), because they deliver the same importance faster.

The math is free and open — you can check any task's score at a glance.

Score display

Scores can be shown in three ways (configurable under Settings → Scoring):

• 0–10 — a square-root normalised scale (default). A score of 10.0 is the maximum.
• Raw — the formula output directly (1.0–100.0).
• Off — numbers are hidden; only the rank order is visible.

Unscored tasks

A task without all three scores sorts to the bottom of the ranked list and also surfaces in the triage section of the attention strip (described above), oldest first — so a freshly captured task stays in view until you rate it. Tap its Score button there for the quick three-tap scorer, or tap the task to score it in the full editor.

The task list

The Tasks view shows your active tasks ranked by score, highest first. The top item is always your recommended next action.

• Tap any task to open the editor and change its name, scores, context, or recurrence.
• Tap the circle on the left to mark a task complete (archive it).
• Attention strip — a bar at the bottom of the list that surfaces two kinds of task without making you leave the ranked view: tasks you have not scored yet (oldest first), and scored tasks that are past their urgency window and ranked too low to still be on screen. Unscored items carry a Score button that opens a quick three-tap scorer. The strip is the only attention surface — there is no separate Attention tab or filter.
• Reorder ties — tasks with the same score can be manually dragged to break the tie. Tasks with different scores cannot be reordered.

Contexts

Contexts are optional labels that group tasks by situation — for example @Work, @Home, or @Errands. They do not change a task's score or rank; they only filter the view.

Adding a context to a task

Inside the task editor, scroll to the CONTEXT · TAP TO SET section. Tap a chip to assign that context to the task, or tap New to create one on the spot. The Inbox chip is the no-context option — pick it to leave the task without a context.

You can also type @ContextName directly in the task name field — Sortomate auto-assigns the matching context on save, creating it if it does not exist yet.

Managing contexts

Open Contexts from the bottom navigation bar (or side rail) to rename or delete contexts. Deleting a context does not delete its tasks; the tasks become No Context.

Filtering by context

The chip bar at the top of the task list lets you filter to one context at a time. Tap All to return to the unfiltered view, or No Context to see only the tasks with no context assigned.

Subtasks

Tasks can have subtasks, forming a tree. The parent task's score reflects its own ratings; each child is independently scored and ranked within its parent.

Adding a subtask

1. On the parent task's row, tap the ⋮ (more) button — or long-press the task — to open its actions menu.
2. Tap Add subtask. The editor opens titled New Subtask.
3. Fill in the subtask name and scores, then tap Add.

Expanding and collapsing

Tap the arrow on a parent task row to expand or collapse its children. The Expand all and Collapse all actions in the top-right menu apply to the whole list at once.

Decompose nudge

If you rate a leaf task as Weeks or Months of effort, Sortomate nudges you to break it down. Tap Suggest subtasks (requires an account and a network connection) to get AI-generated subtask suggestions via Google Gemini. You select which ones to add; none are saved without your approval.

Completing tasks

Tap the circle to the left of a task to mark it done. The task is archived immediately and disappears from the active list. A snackbar confirms the action and offers an Undo button.

Archived tasks are still accessible. Open Completed Tasks from the top-right menu (desktop) or the overflow menu (mobile) to browse them.

Undo

Sortomate keeps a multi-level undo history for the current session. Completing, deleting, and editing a task are all undoable. After each action a snackbar appears for a few seconds with an Undo button; you can also tap the undo icon in the toolbar.

Tap undo repeatedly to step back through your recent actions, one at a time — not only the most recent one. The history is held in memory for the current session only, so it clears when you restart the app, and there is no redo. To recover an older state, restore a cloud backup (see below).

Recurring tasks

Turn on Repeat after completion in the task editor to make a task recur. When you complete a recurring task, Sortomate immediately creates a fresh copy with the same name and scores, and a new urgency window starting from now. There are no fixed schedules or due dates — only the window restarts.

Search & filter

Tap the search icon in the top bar to search across all task names. Results update as you type. Press Escape (desktop) or the close button to exit search.

Use the context chips below the top bar to filter to a single context, as described under Contexts.

Sign-in & sync

Sortomate is offline-first. Every change is saved to a local database on your device immediately, before anything touches the network. You do not need an account to use the app.

Guest mode

Without signing in — tap Use without an account on the sign-in screen — your tasks live only on the device you are using. They will not sync to other devices and will not appear in cloud backups.

Signing in

Tap Sign In with Google on the sign-in screen. After authenticating, your local tasks are claimed by your account and synced to the cloud. On subsequent opens, tasks sync automatically when you are online.

Sync status

The cloud icon in the top bar shows the current sync state:

• Cloud with a check — all changes synced.
• Spinning indicator — sync in progress.
• Cloud-off icon — offline or sync error. Changes are saved locally and will sync when connectivity returns.

Backup & restore

Cloud backups require a signed-in account and an active connection. Go to Settings → Backups.

Automated backups

With Automated Cloud Backups enabled (the default), Sortomate creates backups on a GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) rotation: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly snapshots. Old snapshots in each tier are replaced automatically, so storage stays bounded.

Manual backup

Tap Create Manual Backup Now to take a snapshot at any time — for example, before a large edit.

Restoring a backup

Choose a backup from the list and restore it. Before anything is overwritten, Sortomate automatically creates a pre-restore snapshot of your current data. If the restore does not go as expected, you can restore that snapshot to return to the state you were in.

Note: Backups are stored as compressed JSON in Supabase Storage. They are not encrypted end-to-end. Do not store task text you would consider highly sensitive.

Settings

Open Settings from the bottom navigation bar (or side rail) to access:

• Filtering — context filter behaviour and subtask visibility in filtered views.
• Scoring — choose how scores are displayed (0–10, Raw, or Off).
• Display — task list text size and line spacing.
• Android Widget — configure the home-screen widget's text size and spacing (Android only).
• Backups — automated and manual cloud backups (see above).
• Import & Export — CSV import and export (see below).

Import & export

Go to Settings → Import & Export to move tasks in or out of Sortomate via CSV.

• Export — downloads a CSV file of your active tasks, including name, importance, urgency, effort, and context.
• Import — reads a CSV file and adds the tasks to your list. The CSV must use the same column format as the export. Any injection-guard characters (a leading apostrophe added by some spreadsheet apps) are stripped automatically on import.

Questions? Reach us at hello@sortomate.com.