Prioritizing actions with impact and effort
The Impact/effort view helps you decide which actions to tackle first. Each action is scored on its impact and the effort it requires. Based on those scores, the action appears in one of four quadrants, so you can see at a glance where the biggest wins are.
Open this view from the toolbar: click View and select Impact/effort.
The four quadrants
The vertical axis represents the impact, the horizontal axis the effort. This creates four quadrants:
- Quick wins: high impact, low effort. Tackle these actions first.
- Major projects: high impact, high effort. Valuable, but make sure to plan enough time and people for them.
- Small improvements: low impact, low effort. Pick these up when there is room.
- Reconsider: low impact, high effort. Ask yourself whether these actions are worth it.
Use the scroll wheel on your mouse or the Zoom slider in the toolbar to zoom in and out. This keeps things clear even when you have a lot of actions.
The Fibonacci scale
You score the impact and the effort not on a regular scale from 1 to 10, but on the Fibonacci scale: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and 21. The steps get bigger as the numbers increase.
That is intentional. Estimating precisely whether something is a 6 or a 7 is hard and takes time. The larger jumps mean you only have to make a rough estimate and force yourself to make a clear choice: is this action about twice as big as that other one, or roughly comparable? So you mainly estimate the actions in relation to each other.
Adding impact and effort to an action
You determine the position in the quadrants by scoring each action on its impact and effort.
- Click an action to open it.
- Click the Impact field and choose a score on the Fibonacci scale.
- Click the Effort field and choose a score on the Fibonacci scale.
- Missing one of the fields? Click Show all fields in the top right.
The changes are saved automatically. The action immediately moves to the matching quadrant. Actions without a score do not yet appear in the quadrants.
Would you rather prioritize the actions as a list? Sort by impact or effort in any view via the toolbar.