There's a quiet con baked into most productivity apps: every checkbox is worth the same. Write a chapter? One check. Reply to an email? One check. That math doesn't reflect real life, and over time it warps how you plan your day — toward tiny, low-friction wins and away from the work that actually moves the needle.
The checklist trap
When every task counts equally, your brain optimises for completions, not output. You start padding your list with tasks you were going to do anyway. You break work into artificially small chunks just to feel momentum. The list grows, the checks pile up, and somehow nothing important got done.
Effort weighting, briefly
Effort weighting is just tagging each task by rough size. Heatmap Todo uses three buckets: Small (a few minutes), Medium (a focused block), Large (a serious chunk of the day). That's it. No story points, no time estimates, no productivity theatre — just an honest sense of how heavy the task is.
- A day with one Large task can outscore a day of ten Smalls.
- Your heatmap shades match real output, not list-checking activity.
- Planning gets harder to fake: you can't fill a day with Smalls and call it deep work.
- Looking back, you can tell focused weeks from busy ones at a glance.
How to size tasks honestly
The simplest rule: if you'd be proud of finishing it as the only thing today, it's Large. If you could realistically knock out three of them between meetings, it's Small. Everything else is Medium. Don't overthink it — the rough categories are the point. The grid will normalise across weeks.
What you get back
Once your tasks are weighted, every other feature gets better. Streaks become meaningful. The momentum score actually correlates with feeling productive. The weekly snapshot stops being a list of busywork and starts being a record of real output. Effort is the missing variable that turns a to-do app into a personal performance log.