Taskaro launched with priority levels. P1 for urgent. P2 for high. P3 for normal. I thought that was the right call.
It wasn't.
Within two weeks of using the app myself every day, I noticed something uncomfortable. I was spending more time deciding whether something was P1 or P2 than I was actually doing the thing. The priority system had become its own task.
Where the Idea Came From
Every major task app has priority levels. Todoist has four. Asana has four. Even Apple Reminders has flags. When you're building a task manager, adding priorities feels like table stakes. It feels like the responsible thing to do.
So I added them. Shipped them. And then started using the app as my daily driver.
Day one: fine. I labeled everything. P1 for the launch tasks, P2 for the nice-to-haves, P3 for the stuff I kept moving to next week.
Week two: I had 11 P1 tasks. If everything is urgent, nothing is. The labels had stopped meaning anything.
The Real Problem With Priority Systems
Priority levels create a meta-layer of work. Before you can do the task, you have to decide how important the task is. That decision takes energy. And when you're wrong about it, or when circumstances change, you have to go back and re-decide.
The result is a system you spend time maintaining instead of using.
I watched myself doing exactly this. Opening Taskaro, scanning the P1 column, wondering if the thing I labeled P2 last Thursday should actually be P1 now, adjusting it, and then realizing 20 minutes had passed and I hadn't done a single thing on the list.
That's the productivity trap in slow motion.
The Decision to Remove It
I removed priority levels entirely in an update a few weeks after launch. No flags, no tiers, no colors. Just tasks in columns: Todo, In Progress, Done.
My reasoning: if something is important, move it to In Progress. That's your signal. The kanban column is the priority system. It's already there.
The first day without priorities felt strange. Incomplete. Like I was missing something.
By day three, I realized I was actually moving through tasks faster. I wasn't stopping to categorize. I was just doing.
What Users Said
Not everyone agreed. A few users asked where priorities went. One message said it plainly: "I need to know what's urgent. Can you bring it back?"
That's a fair ask. Not everyone thinks the same way. Some people need an explicit urgent flag, especially when juggling tasks across multiple projects or deadlines.
I thought about it for a while. The goal wasn't to be clever. The goal was to make the app useful.
How It Came Back
Priority came back, but as a single toggle. Not P1 through P4. Just: is this task important right now, or isn't it?
One flag. Two states. No ranking system. If you mark something important, it gets a small visual indicator. That's it. No hierarchy, no four-level decision tree.
The cognitive load drops to almost zero. You look at a task and ask one question: does this need to stand out? Yes or no. Done.
What I Learned
The lesson isn't "features are bad." The lesson is that features create decisions, and decisions take energy. Every field on a task form, every option on a menu, every configuration panel is a small tax on your attention.
The right question isn't "what can we add?" It's "what decision can we remove?"
Taskaro is built around that question. Not every answer is obvious upfront. Sometimes you ship, watch how it's used, and adjust. That's what happened here. The priority feature got simpler because the original version wasn't earning its complexity.
The current version does. One toggle. Much better.