User manual

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

Sortomate is also available on the web at sortomate.app.

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
   Urgency	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 is a personal priority tool: it helps you decide your next action. It is not a delegation or assignment tool: there are no assignees, no shared inboxes, no handoffs. Every task in the list belongs to one person deciding what to do next for themselves.

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. By default there are no due dates in Sortomate, only urgency windows (Today → Someday) that you pick yourself. A task can also carry an optional hard deadline (see below), which derives urgency automatically instead.
• 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. "Why is this next?" always has a plain, hand-verifiable answer.

Sortomate uses AI as a suggesting assistant (the Decompose feature proposes subtasks; you decide which ones to keep). It does not use AI to rank your work. Ranking is deterministic and fully explained by the formula above. The goal is a glass-box tool where you stay in control of every priority decision.

Ranking order

Tasks are sorted by rating, highest first. When two tasks share the same rating, Sortomate breaks the tie in a fixed order: first your own manual arrangement, then time-pressure (how far each task is through its urgency window), then age, with older tasks first. Tasks with different ratings are never reordered by hand; only tied-rating tasks can be dragged into your own order (see "Reorder ties" under the task list).

Score display

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

• 0–10: the square root of the raw score, shown on a 0–10 scale (default). A score of 10.0 is the maximum.
• Raw: the formula output directly (roughly 0.16 up to 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 below, under "The task list"), oldest first, so a freshly captured task stays in view until you rate it. Tap its Score pill there for the quick three-tap scorer, or tap the task to score it in the full editor.

Quick-add shorthand

The same Task field also accepts inline tokens that set a task's scores as you type, so a routine capture never has to leave the keyboard for the tap-cells:

• ! sets importance: a label prefix (!crit for Critical) or a bare digit 1–5.
• * sets urgency the same way (*tod for Today, or a digit). A date-shaped value after * instead pins a hard deadline (see below).
• ~ sets effort the same way (~quick is a shortcut for Minutes, or use a digit).
• #111 (three digits 1–5, in Importance-Urgency-Effort order) sets all three scores in one token. Anything after # that is not exactly three 1–5 digits is a tag instead (see Tags).

Matching is case-insensitive and by prefix, so a few letters are enough. Tokens stay visible in the field while you type and are stripped from the task name only when you save; an unrecognised token (a bare ! with no word after it, for example) is left as ordinary text instead of erroring. This works anywhere the Task field appears: the New task sheet and the full task editor alike.

Hard deadlines

Most tasks in Sortomate never get a due date: you pick urgency yourself, from Today to Someday. But when a task genuinely has one (a filing deadline, an event date), you can pin it and let Sortomate do the math.

• Setting one: open the task editor and tap the low-key Add hard deadline row below the score grid, then pick a date. You can also type it inline in the quick-add field: a date-shaped value after * (for example *2026-09-30, *sep30, or *30sep) pins a deadline, the same way #tag and #111 are recognised by shape. Either way, the deadline anchors to the end of the picked day (23:59:59 local time), so picking today means "due by the end of today", not instantly overdue.

• What changes: the 1–5 urgency selector is replaced by a single rectangle showing the derived urgency value and a small clock glyph (hover or long-press it for a reminder that the number changes as the deadline approaches). The date itself, and the × to unpin the deadline and return to picking urgency manually, sit just below the score grid.

• How urgency is derived ("start by"): Sortomate counts back your effort estimate from the deadline, so a bigger task starts looking urgent earlier:

  Effort	Counted back from the deadline
  Minutes	0 (no early start-by credit)
  Hours	1 day
  Days	1 week
  Weeks	1 month
  Months	1 quarter

  The remaining "start by" time is then placed on the same 1–5 curve as manual urgency: 1 day → 1, 1 week → 2, 1 month → 3, 1 quarter → 4, 1 year or more → 5 (continuous in between: 2.3 is a normal result, not a rounding artifact).

• Past the deadline: a dated task whose date has already passed does not get pinned to maximum urgency. Instead it drops into the attention strip with a Due pill: tap it (or the row) to do the task, reschedule it, or drop it. A decision point, not a false alarm.

• Recompute: urgency for a dated task recalculates automatically (on app open and once a day in the background) as the deadline approaches. This is silent and local to each device; it never counts as an edit.

No invented due dates: when the world gives you a real one, we do the math, not the guilt.

Share to Sortomate

Android only: send text into Sortomate straight from another app's Share action, without opening Sortomate first.

• Sharing: in any other app, share a note, a copied snippet, or selected text, and pick Sortomate from the share sheet.
• One task per line: each non-blank line of the shared text becomes its own task. A single line makes one task; a multi-line note makes one task per line.
• Same shorthand applies: each line is parsed exactly like the Task field (see "Quick-add shorthand" above), so !, *, ~, #111, and #tag tokens work the same way. A line with no recognised scores lands unscored in the attention strip's triage section, same as any other unscored task.
• Confirmation: Sortomate switches to Tasks and shows a snackbar summarising the result, for example "Added 3 tasks, 1 skipped". A line that was only tokens with nothing left to name the task (a bare #groceries, say) counts as skipped rather than silently vanishing.

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, tags, or recurrence.
• Tap the circle on the left to mark a task complete (archive it), or swipe the row right to complete it without opening anything.
• Long-press a task (or right-click on desktop, or tap the ⋮ button at the end of the row) to open the task's actions menu. From there you can:
  • Why this rank?: see the formula explained in plain words for that task.
  • Complete task: archive the task immediately.
  • Add subtask: open a new subtask editor parented to this task.
  • Decompose: get AI-generated subtask suggestions (requires account + network).
  • Move to…: pick a new parent for the task, or promote it to top level.
  • Repeat after completion / Stop repeating: toggle recurring behaviour.
  • Promote task / Demote task: shift the task one level up or down in the hierarchy (shown only when the task is already nested).
• Attention strip: a bar at the bottom of the list that surfaces tasks without making you leave the ranked view, each with a small text pill on its left naming why it is there: Score (green, not yet scored; opens the quick three-tap scorer), Renew (a scored task past its urgency window and ranked too low to still be on screen; one tap restarts the window from now, with an Undo snackbar; your rank and score are never touched), Due (past its own hard deadline; opens the editor), and Split (a high-effort task worth breaking down; see "Decompose nudge" below). The strip is the only attention surface. There is no separate Attention tab or filter. Set the row count to 0 in Settings → Display to hide it entirely.
• Reorder ties: tasks with the same score can be manually dragged to break the tie once Arrange tasks mode is on (tap the swap-vertical icon in the app bar, or Arrange tasks in the overflow menu on mobile, to reveal the drag handles; tap Stop arranging to hide them again). Tasks with different scores cannot be reordered.

The Now tab

The Now tab is a second, single-task view of the same ranked list: a calm focus surface for when you just want to be told the one next action instead of scanning the whole list. It shows the current #1 task as a big card with its rank, plain-language reason (importance / urgency / effort), and score, plus three actions:

• Done: completes the task (same as tapping the circle in Tasks) and reveals the new #1.
• Edit: opens the full task editor to adjust its name, scores, tags, or notes.
• Skip: shows the next-ranked task instead, without changing anything. This is session-only: the Now tab always resets to the true #1 the next time you open it, so a repeatedly-skipped task keeps resurfacing until you either complete it or re-rate it.

Now only ever offers a leaf task as the #1: a task that still has open subtasks of its own is skipped, since completing it would finish the whole subtree in one tap, not just the one action shown. A task whose deadline has already passed is skipped too; it needs a decision in the attention strip instead of sitting frozen at the top of Now. If a tag filter is active in Tasks, Now respects it and shows a small filter line under the title ("Filtered by" plus the tag names, or "Filtered: no tag" when the No tag view is active) so its #1 is never mistaken for your true, unfiltered #1.

Tags

Tags are optional labels that group tasks by situation, project, or energy level (for example #work, #home, or #high-energy). A task can carry many tags. Tags do not change a task's score or rank; they only filter the view.

Adding tags to a task

Inside the task editor, scroll to the TAGS · TAP TO ADD OR REMOVE section. Tap an existing chip to toggle it on or off, or tap New to create a tag on the spot.

You can also type #tagName directly in the task name field: Sortomate auto-assigns the matching tag on save, creating it if it does not exist yet. Tag names are space-free (use hyphens, e.g. #high-energy).

Managing tags

Open Manage tags from the navigation drawer (mobile), or the Edit action at the end of the tag chip bar, or the Tags destination on the bottom navigation bar / side rail: all three open the same screen. Tap a tag's row to apply it as your only active filter and jump straight to Tasks; use its Edit tag and Delete tag icons instead to rename or delete it. Deleting a tag does not delete its tasks; the tasks simply lose that tag.

Tags with the same name always merge. Creating a tag whose name already exists reuses the existing tag, and renaming a tag into an existing name (matching is case-insensitive) warns first, then merges: every task tagged with the old tag is re-tagged with the surviving one, and the old tag is removed.

When the Tag order setting (Settings → Display) is set to Manual (#588), each row here shows a drag handle so you can arrange tags into your own order; the arrangement syncs to your other devices.

Filtering by tags

The chip bar at the top of the task list lets you filter by one or more tags. Selecting multiple tags shows only tasks that carry all of them (AND filter). Tap All to return to the unfiltered view, or No tag to see only the tasks with no tags 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. Score chain, between them, collapses each root task down to only the descendant path that drives its score, a one-shot way to see why a task ranks where it does without hand-expanding the whole tree.

Decompose nudge

If you rate a leaf task as Weeks or Months of effort, Sortomate nudges you to break it down. Tap Decompose (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. The same nudge appears in the attention strip as a Split pill (offline, it opens Add subtask instead).

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 app bar (desktop) or the navigation drawer (mobile, tap the logo mark in the top-left to open it) to browse them.

Undo & redo

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 (or the overflow menu on mobile).

Tap undo repeatedly to step back through your recent actions, one at a time, not only the most recent one. Tap Redo (next to Undo in the toolbar or overflow menu) to step forward again through anything you have undone. The history is held in memory for the current session only, so it clears when you restart the app. To recover an older state after that, 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 shortly after you stop typing. Press Escape (desktop) or the close button to exit search.

Use the tag chips below the top bar to filter by tags, as described under Tags.

Saved views

A saved view is a named snapshot of the tag filter and search you have active, so a slice you return to often (like your #ops tasks) is one tap away instead of rebuilt by hand each time.

Saving a view

With a tag filter and/or search active, tap Save current view (a toolbar icon on wider screens, or inside the overflow (⋮) menu on mobile), name it, and tap Save. Saved views are hidden from both locations while you are searching; stop searching first if you do not see the option.

Applying, renaming, and deleting

Tap Manage saved views (the same locations as Save current view) to open the Saved views sheet:

• Apply: tap a view's row to apply its filter and search, and close the sheet.
• Rename or delete: tap the ⋮ next to a view for Rename or Delete.

Saved views live on this device only; they do not sync to your other devices.

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 Continue 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.

Email sign-in

You can also sign in with an email and password instead of Google. Enter your Email and Password on the sign-in screen and tap Sign in.

• Creating an account: tap Create an account, fill in Email and Password, and tap Create account. If email confirmation is required, check your inbox for a confirmation link before signing in; use the Resend action on the snackbar if it does not arrive.
• Forgot your password?: tap Forgot password? on the sign-in screen (email + password mode) to send a password-reset link to the address you entered.

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 while signed in. Changes are saved locally and will sync when connectivity returns.
• Cloud-off icon, labelled Local only, sign in for backup: guest mode (not signed in), so there is no cloud account yet to sync to. Tap the icon and then Sign in to enable cloud sync and backups.
• Small red dot on the icon: your last automatic backup failed. This dot appears on top of whichever state the icon is showing (signed in only). Tap the icon for details and a Backup now action to retry.

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 compressed and then encrypted on your device (AES-GCM-256) before they are uploaded, so they are opaque at rest in Supabase Storage. The encryption key is kept in your account (escrowed), so this is not zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption: in principle the service operator could decrypt a backup. Passphrase-based end-to-end encryption is planned for a later release.

Settings

Open Settings from the bottom navigation bar (or side rail) to reach each subsection described below.

Display

Display is where score presentation, task-list appearance, and tag-filter behaviour all live (#489).

Score. Sets how the priority number appears next to each task. The ranking order is always the same regardless of this setting.

• 0–10 (default): the square root of the raw score, on a 0–10 scale. Easier to read at a glance; the maximum is 10.
• Raw: the exact formula output (roughly 0.16–100). Shows the full range and is the number used internally for ranking.
• Off: hides the number entirely. The rank order and score ring are still visible; only the digit is hidden.

Below the score picker, a Scoring explained link opens this manual at How scoring works, where the formula, the 0–10 conversion, the ranking order, and hard deadlines are all explained in full. This setting is per-device and is not synced to the cloud.

Task list. Adjusts how the task list looks on this device.

• Text size: font size for task names in the list (8–24 sp). Default 14.
• Line spacing: vertical padding between rows (0–20 dp). Default 8 on mobile, 4 on desktop/web. Setting it to 0 gives flush rows; higher values add breathing room.
• Wrap long task names: when on, long names wrap to multiple lines instead of truncating with an ellipsis. Off by default.
• Attention strip rows: how many attention-strip rows show before scrolling (0-8). Default 3. Set it to 0 and the strip reads Hidden and disappears entirely. This one control replaces the old show/hide toggle.

Task-list settings are per-device and not synced.

Filtering by a tag always shows the subtasks of matching tasks too, even if those subtasks have no tag set of their own, so you keep the full context of a filtered task.

Tags. Tag order sets how tags are sorted everywhere they appear (the filter chip bar, Manage tags, and the task editor's tag picker). Unlike the other Display settings, this choice DOES sync across your devices (#588).

• Recent (default): tags on the most recently updated tasks appear first.
• Most used: tags applied to the most tasks appear first, all-time.
• A to Z: tags are listed alphabetically.
• Manual: your own drag order. Switch to Manual and the Tags tab (Manage tags) shows a drag handle on every row so you can arrange them by hand; the order syncs to your other devices. Switching to another order and back always restores your last manual arrangement; it is never lost.

Android widget

Android widget (Android only) configures the home-screen widget that shows your top tasks without opening the app.

• Text size: font size for task names in the widget (8–24 sp).
• Line spacing: vertical padding between widget rows (0–20 dp).
• Wrap long task names: same as the in-app setting, but for the widget.

Backups

Backups manages cloud snapshots of your data. Requires a signed-in account and an active connection.

• Automated cloud backups: when on (default), Sortomate creates backups on a GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) rotation: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly. Old snapshots in each tier are replaced automatically, so storage stays bounded.
• Create manual backup now: take a snapshot immediately, useful before a large reorganisation.

Restoring a backup is described in the Backup & restore section above.

Import & Export

Import & Export moves tasks in and out of Sortomate via CSV. See the Import & Export section below and the CSV file format appendix for column details.

Privacy & data

Privacy & data explains how Sortomate handles your data during the beta, and holds the opt-in toggle for usage analytics.

• Share usage data: off by default. When on, Sortomate counts how often you use features like capture, scoring, filters, saved views, and AI decompose, along with how often you use quick tokens like !, *, ~, and #. Only totals leave your device, together with your app version and platform; each upload is tied to your account id, so the counts are per-account, not anonymous. Your task names, notes, and tags are never collected for this, whether the toggle is on or off.

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 tags. Sortomate adds a leading apostrophe to any task text that starts with a formula character (=, +, -, or @) as a spreadsheet injection guard; that apostrophe is stripped automatically on import, so a round-trip leaves your text unchanged.
• Import: reads a CSV file and adds the tasks to your list. The CSV must use the same column format as the export.

CSV file format

Sortomate produces two CSV flavours from Settings → Import & Export.

Friendly export

The readable format (Export user-friendly CSV). Headers:

Backup export

The full-fidelity format (Export all (Backup CSV)). Includes all columns from the friendly export plus:

Import contract

• CSV only: JSON backups are encrypted blobs and cannot be imported via this screen.
• Exact snake_case headers required: task_text, urgency_score, etc. Friendly single-word aliases (Task, Urgency, Importance, Effort, Duration) are also accepted, but the snake_case names take priority.
• calculated_rating is not imported: Sortomate recomputes the rating from the three score columns on import. Any calculated_rating column in the file is silently ignored.
• Tags and parents auto-create: if an imported row names a tag or parent that does not exist yet, Sortomate creates it. Every unique new name in the file is created; there is no per-import cap.
• Score values must be in the 1.0–5.0 range; out-of-range values are treated as unscored (a warning appears in the import report).
• Injection-guard apostrophes: task text starting with =, +, -, or @ has a leading apostrophe added on export and stripped on import; a round-trip leaves the text unchanged.

Questions? Reach us at hello@sortomate.com.