15 Best Work Prioritization Tools to Recover Lost Hours

The average knowledge worker spends 41% of their time on tasks that could be handled by someone else or automated entirely. That’s 16 hours a week you’re spending on work that doesn’t deserve your attention.

Have you noticed how most prioritization advice amounts to “just decide what matters most”?

As if that’s the easy part.

As if we’re all choosing between curing cancer and scrolling Twitter.

The actual challenge is deciding between tasks that all seem important.

Between the client project due tomorrow, the strategy document your boss keeps mentioning, and the team crisis that just landed in your inbox.

What makes this worse is that our brains are terrible at prioritization.

We naturally drift toward tasks with immediate rewards, not those with long-term value. We avoid the complex in favor of the simple. And we’re easily influenced by whatever happened most recently.

The best prioritization tools don’t just organize your tasks. They change how you think about your work. They make good decisions automatically rather than effortful.

Here are the 15 that deliver on their promises.

The Best Work Prioritization Tools At A Glance

1. Sunsama

Sunsama is a digital daily planner to help you balance focused work with reasonable boundaries.

Sunsama forces you to be realistic about time.

Each morning, it guides you through a planning ritual. You select tasks from your connected apps (Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.), estimate how long each will take, and arrange them into your day.

When you hit your daily capacity—say, 6 hours—it signals you to stop adding tasks.

This simple constraint changes everything. You’re no longer pretending you can do 12 hours of work in an 8-hour day.

The unified daily view consolidates your fragmented work life. Tasks from various project tools, emails from Gmail, meetings from your calendar—all in one place.

For people with ADHD, Sunsama seems particularly helpful.

Julia Jones, a Sunsama user, wrote:

“I’ve been overjoyed with the way Sunsama helps me reduce the pain points I experience with executive function at work.”

The timeboxing feature deserves special mention. Rather than just listing tasks, you schedule them into specific time blocks on your calendar.

You can also categorize work into channels and contexts.

Sunsama Features

• Guided daily planning ritual that helps you choose what matters
• Time estimation for each task to make your workload transparent
• Daily capacity limits that prevent overcommitment
• Unified view pulling tasks from Trello, Asana, ClickUp, and other tools
• Calendar syncing across Google, Outlook, and iCloud
• Focus Mode for deep work on one task at a time
• Daily shutdown ritual and weekly reviews to reflect on progress
• Analytics to track how you spend your time

Sunsama Price

2. Monday.com Work Management

Monday.com is a work management platform that structures your tasks into visual boards where prioritization happens naturally through customizable workflows.

Most prioritization fails because you can’t see everything that matters in one place. You end up working on whatever screams loudest, not what creates actual value.

Monday.com solves this by making work visible. Everything lives in boards where you can instantly filter by priority, deadline, or any parameter that matters to your team.

What separates Monday.com from other tools I’ve used is how it handles dependencies. When you connect related tasks, you can see exactly what’s blocking high-priority work.

This eliminates the familiar problem of finishing something urgent only to discover you’re still waiting on three other people.

You can zoom out to see entire projects, portfolios, and company objectives.

I’ve found most teams typically have no systematic way to decide what deserves attention first.

Monday.com’s customizable priority fields and color coding create that system without requiring everyone to become productivity experts.

Their AI capabilities help with prioritization decisions. It identifies potential risks across projects and surfaces them before they derail important work.

Monday.com Features

• Project, portfolio, and process management in one platform
• Real-time dashboards that visualize work progress
• Resource management to optimize team workloads
• Goals and OKRs tracking to align daily work with strategy
• AI capabilities that identify risks and streamline workflows
• Extensive customization options for complex business needs
• Integration with hundreds of other tools via their marketplace

Monday.com Price

3. Notion

Notion is a connected workspace that combines notes, docs, and project management into a unified system.

I was skeptical of the “all-in-one” promise at first. Usually, tools that do everything do nothing well. But Notion’s flexibility creates something genuinely different.

The database system is what makes Notion work for prioritization. You can transform the same information between tables, kanban boards, calendars, and timelines.

Need to see deadlines in sequence?

Calendar view.

Need to visualize workload?

Board view with assignees.

Everyone has their own prioritization method.

The AI capabilities make prioritization even more efficient. You can generate summaries of project docs, extract action items from meeting notes, and even analyze PDFs for relevant information.

That said, Notion isn’t perfect for urgent, in-the-moment task management.

Notion excels when your priorities need context to be meaningful. When the “why” behind a task matters as much as the task itself.

For people with ADHD, Notion works as a “second brain” — capturing everything, so your actual brain can focus on execution rather than remembering.

Notion Features

• Flexible databases that transform between tables, boards, calendars, and timelines
• Connected pages where tasks link directly to relevant documentation
• AI capabilities for summarizing content and extracting action items
• Templates for different prioritization systems
• Custom fields and properties to match your prioritization criteria
• Time management with Notion Calendar integration

Notion Price

4. ClickUp

ClickUp is a unified workspace that combines tasks, docs, goals, and chat in one platform.

The 15+ views are ClickUp’s killer feature for prioritization. The same work can instantly transform between list, board, calendar, Gantt, and timeline views.

Some days you need a calendar view to see what’s urgent. Other days you need a board to sort by impact. ClickUp lets you switch perspectives without recreating your data.

I’ve found their hierarchy system useful.

You can organize work from high-level Spaces down to granular subtasks and checklists, creating a natural priority structure.

The workload view deserves special mention for prioritization. It shows who’s overallocated, preventing the common mistake of assigning high-priority work to people who are already maxed out.

ClickUp’s automation capabilities also help enforce prioritization rules. You can automatically flag tasks when deadlines approach or bump priority levels when certain conditions are met.

Their AI feature (ClickUp Brain) is newer but promising for prioritization. It can search across connected apps and suggest what might need attention.

That said, ClickUp can feel overwhelming at first. There are so many features that finding the ones that matter for your prioritization system takes time.

ClickUp Features

• 15+ views including list, board, Gantt, calendar, and workload
• Customizable workflows with 35+ ClickApps and 50+ automation
• Time tracking with estimates and reporting
• AI-powered search and assistance via ClickUp Brain
• Goals and milestones for tracking strategic priorities
• Hierarchical organization from Spaces to subtasks
• Real-time collaboration with comments, chat, and whiteboards
• Dashboards for visualizing team progress and bottlenecks

ClickUp Price

5. Todoist

Todoist is a task manager that strips away complexity to help you capture and organize what matters.

I’ve tried dozens of task apps, and none match how quickly you can get things out of your head with Todoist’s natural language input.

Type “Finish report tomorrow at 3 pm p1” and it understands exactly what you mean—creating a high-priority task with the right deadline and time.

I am convinced that when prioritization feels frictionless, you actually do it. When it requires six clicks through nested menus, you don’t.

The way Todoist handles priority is straightforward. Four levels (P1-P4) with distinct colors. No complicated matrices or scoring systems.

You can filter by these priorities across any context—today’s tasks, a specific project, or everything due this week.

The board view deserves special mention for visual prioritization. It creates instant clarity about what’s in progress, what’s next, and what’s blocked—similar to Monday.com but with less overhead.

One Todoist fan on Reddit put it nicely:

“Todoist is really the secret to my success. It’s so quick and easy to add a task that I don’t even use the inbox.”

That’s the thing about good prioritization tools—they get out of your way.

Todoist Features

• Natural language input that recognizes dates, priorities, and projects
• Four-level priority system (P1 to P4) for clear task ranking
• Filters that combine parameters for custom priority views
• Board, list, and calendar layouts to match your prioritization style
• Cross-platform sync across 10+ apps and devices
• Quick add that works from anywhere with keyboard shortcuts
• Sub-tasks for breaking complex priorities into manageable steps

Todoist Price

6. MoSCoW Method

The MoSCoW Method is a prioritization framework that sorts tasks into four categories:

1. Must have
2. Should have
3. Could have
4. and Won’t have.

Unlike the digital tools we’ve discussed, MoSCoW is a mental model for making decisions about what matters most.

I’ve found it works best when you have a fixed deadline and more tasks than time. The method forces a conversation that most teams avoid: what will actually break if we don’t do this?

The “Must haves” create your minimum viable product—the absolute baseline for success. This cuts through the tendency for everything to seem equally important.

You see this problem in tools like Todoist or Monday.com—people marking most tasks as “high priority” until the designation means nothing.

MoSCoW fixes this by limiting your Must-haves. If everything’s critical, nothing is.

The Should haves and Could haves create a natural backlog when time permits. The Won’t haves (this time) acknowledge reality—some good ideas simply won’t make the cut.

What separates MoSCoW from other prioritization approaches is how accessible it is to non-technical stakeholders. There’s no complex scoring system or matrices.

One product manager put it well:

“I’ve tried a number of different prioritization frameworks, but MoSCoW and Value x Effort are the ones I always come back to. The simplicity makes it easy for everyone to engage.”

That said, MoSCoW has limitations. It doesn’t help you decide between competing “Must haves.” Stakeholders often try to categorize 80% of features as “Must have,” making the entire exercise pointless.

You can implement MoSCoW in any of the tools we’ve already covered. Create a custom field in Monday.com, set up a property in Notion, or use tags in Todoist.

MoSCoW Features

• A simple four-category system that’s easy to explain
• Works well with timeboxed projects and fixed deadlines
• Can be implemented in any tool (or on paper)
• Creates natural minimum viable product boundaries
• Accessible to non-technical stakeholders
• Forces conversation about true priorities

7. Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a work management platform that adapts to different scales and complexity levels.

Smartsheet offers flexible views. The same data transforms between Grid, Gantt, Card, Calendar, and Timeline views with a single click.

I’ve noticed that prioritization breaks down when you can’t see how resources match up with tasks. Smartsheet’s workload tracking feature solves this directly.

You can see who’s overallocated and who has the capacity, preventing the common mistake of assigning high-priority work to people who are already maxed out—similar to ClickUp’s workload view but with more robust reporting.

The automation capabilities are worth exploring.

You can build workflows that adjust priorities based on changing conditions, route approvals to the right people, or flag at-risk deliverables before they become problems.

What separates Smartsheet from tools like Monday.com is its adaptability to large-scale operations.

You can start with simple project tracking and scale to complex portfolio management without switching platforms.

Smartsheet Features

• Multiple views (Grid, Gantt, Card, Calendar, Timeline) for different prioritization perspectives
• Dashboards for visualizing priorities and progress across projects
• Workload tracking to align priorities with team capacity
• Automation to enforce prioritization rules and flag risks
• Resource management for aligning priorities with available resources
• AI capabilities for generating formulas and insights
• Robust collaboration with controlled sharing and real-time updates

Smartsheet Price

8. Agile Prioritization Matrix

The Agile Prioritization Matrix is a visual decision-making framework that plots tasks on a grid based on their impact and effort required.

Most prioritization fails because it’s too subjective. Everyone thinks their project is the most important one.

The Matrix solves this by forcing you to evaluate tasks along two specific dimensions. On one axis, you measure impact or value. On the other, you measure effort or complexity.

This creates four quadrants that immediately clarify what you should be working on:

1. Quick Wins: High impact, low effort. Do these first.
2. Major Projects: High impact, high effort. Plan these carefully.
3. Fill-ins: Low impact, low effort. Do these when you have downtime.
4. Thankless Tasks: Low impact, high effort. Avoid these or find a better approach.

Unlike the MoSCoW method we looked at earlier, which categorizes tasks but doesn’t help you compare them, the Matrix lets you see the entire landscape of work at once.

I’ve found this especially useful when managing teams. Everyone can see why certain tasks take priority. It’s not because I said so. It’s because the Matrix makes it obvious.

The Matrix also reveals an uncomfortable truth about work: many tasks that consume our time belong in the “Thankless Tasks” quadrant. They take enormous effort but deliver minimal value.

When you plot your tasks on the Matrix, these time sinks become impossible to ignore.

Agile Prioritization Matrix Features

• Visual framework for evaluating tasks based on impact and effort
• Forces explicit trade-offs between competing priorities
• Works well with existing project management tools
• Creates clarity and alignment across teams
• Minimizes subjective decision-making
• Can be adapted to different organizational contexts
• Identifies quick wins for immediate action

9. Any.do

Any.do is a task management platform that combines to-do lists, calendars, and planning tools.

The “My Day” planning feature is what makes Any.do work for prioritization. Each morning, it gives you a clean slate with smart suggestions about what deserves your attention.

The prioritization approach is dead simple: color tags. No complex scoring systems or priority matrices like we saw with the Agile Prioritization Matrix.

Any.do shines in its cross-context prioritization.

The board view lets you visualize work priorities, while the shared grocery list helps manage household priorities—all in the same system.

This cross-context functionality makes it uniquely suited for remote workers, small business owners, and parents—people whose work and personal priorities constantly bleed into each other.

Sarah Patel, a medical student and an Any.do user, describes it well:

“Any.do’s recurring reminders and location-based alerts are perfect for my busy life, as I’m often too tired to remember important chores. Getting reminders right when I’m at the right place to excute them is a gamechanger. It’s like having a personal assistant.”

Any.do Features

• My Day planner with smart task suggestions and daily reset
• Color tagging for visual prioritization
• Multiple views (list, board, calendar) for different prioritization contexts
• Location-based reminders to trigger priorities by context
• WhatsApp integration for capturing priorities on the go
• Shared boards for family and team prioritization
• Templates to standardize recurring prioritization needs
• Time tracking to measure where priorities go

Any.do Price

10. Amazing Marvin

Amazing Marvin is a personal productivity system that combines task management, time tracking, project planning, and habit formation into a single tool.

Its modular design lets you build your own workflow. You activate only the features you need and ignore the rest.

I’ve noticed that prioritization fails when your tools are too rigid. When the method doesn’t match how you think, you abandon it.

Marvin’s “Strategies” system is the solution.

Need an Eisenhower Matrix? Activate that module.

Want time blocking? Turn it on.

Need the Pomodoro technique? It’s there when you want it.

The customization goes deeper than other tools we’ve seen. You can build your own sidebar, create custom labels, design smart lists with complex filters, and set up dependencies between tasks.

The “Procrastination Wizard” helps you identify why you’re avoiding a task and suggests specific techniques to overcome the resistance.

For people with ADHD or executive dysfunction, this approach is transformative. As one user put it:

“Amazing Marvin worked a lot better for me than Notion in terms of organizing myself.”

The day planning feature is phenomenal for prioritization. Each day gets its own workspace where you can plan exactly what matters, visualize your time blocks, and track progress toward your daily goals.

Amazing Marvin Features

• Behavioral psychology principles to overcome procrastination
• Modular “Strategies” system for extreme customization
• Multiple prioritization methods (Eisenhower Matrix, time blocking, etc.)
• Built-in timers (Pomodoro, Sandlock) with session tracking
• Task dependencies to sequence your priorities
• “Super Focus Mode” for deep work on a single task
• Time tracking to measure where priorities go
• Habit tracking to build productive routines

Amazing Marvin Price

11. ProofHub

ProofHub is a project management and team collaboration platform that centralizes all your projects, teams, and communications in one place.

What struck me about ProofHub is how it approaches prioritization through visualization.

Like Monday.com, it offers multiple ways to see your work—Table view, Boards, Gantt charts, and calendars.

But it adds something crucial: workload reports.

ProofHub’s workload view shows you exactly who has the capacity before you assign that critical task.

The task management system includes labels for prioritization—similar to Todoist’s approach but more visual. You can categorize work based on urgency, impact, or any system that makes sense for your team.

Dependencies are another standout feature.

You can explicitly link tasks that rely on each other, preventing the common prioritization mistake of starting high-priority work that’s blocked by something else.

This is more robust than what we saw in Any.do but not quite as sophisticated as ClickUp’s dependency features.

One project manager described their experience:

“We were facing difficulties in managing projects—tasks weren’t distributed well, issues weren’t resolved fast, and efficiency was hampered. Switching to ProofHub made things smoother and structured. Communication improved, and projects now end on time.”

That last part—ending on time—is the ultimate measure of good prioritization.

ProofHub Features

• Multiple views (Table, Boards, Gantt, Calendar) for different prioritization contexts
• Task management with labels, dependencies, and assignees
• Workload reports to balance priorities across team capacity
• Custom roles to control access based on prioritization needs
• Proofing tools to speed up review cycles
• Time tracking to measure where priorities go
• Mobile apps for iOS and Android

ProofHub Price

12. 1-3-9 Prioritization Technique

The 1-3-9 Prioritization Technique is a task management framework that organizes your day into exactly thirteen items:

• one critical task
• three important tasks
• and nine smaller tasks.

The 1-3-9 method solves this through mathematical constraints. You can only have one most important thing. Not three, not five. One.

I’ve found this constraint oddly liberating. When you know you can only pick one critical task, you stop pretending everything is equally important.

It works because it mirrors how productivity happens. You do your best work on one critical thing each day, can reasonably handle about three secondary priorities, and might chip away at a handful of smaller tasks if time permits.

Unlike the Agile Prioritization Matrix I discussed earlier, there’s no effort estimation here. The 1-3-9 method cares only about importance, not difficulty.

The beauty is how easily this technique integrates with other tools. You can implement it in Todoist by using priority flags, in Notion using a simple database, or even on a Post-it note.

I’ve experimented with using it alongside Sunsama’s timeboxing approach. First deciding my 1-3-9 priorities, then estimating how long each will take. The combination is powerful.

1-3-9 Prioritization Technique Features

• The daily structure of exactly 13 tasks divided into three tiers of importance
• Single critical task identification forces genuine prioritization
• Three important tasks provide a secondary focus when the main task is complete
• Nine smaller tasks create a “nice-to-have” backlog without overwhelming you
• Adapts to any existing tool (Todoist, Notion, ClickUp, etc.)
• The daily reset function prevents yesterday’s priorities from automatically becoming today’s

13. Clockwise

Clockwise is an AI-powered calendar assistant that optimizes your schedule to create blocks of uninterrupted time.

For starters, Clockwise moves your flexible meetings automatically. You tell it which meetings can shift, and it rearranges them to create what they call “Focus Time” — blocks of 2+ hours with no interruptions.

I’ve found their approach uniquely effective because it doesn’t require everyone to adopt a new productivity religion. You just mark which meetings are flexible, and the AI handles the rest.

The “flexible holds” feature deserves special mention.

You can schedule tasks like “write blog post” or routines like “lunch” as flexible events, and Clockwise will automatically move them as your calendar evolves.

This is similar to Amazing Marvin’s time blocking but with a crucial difference: Clockwise actively reshuffles your blocks as new meetings arrive.

Clockwise deeply understands your team dynamics.

It knows that my 1:1 with Charu needs 30 minutes, but it doesn’t have to be Tuesday at 2 pm specifically. It can move to Wednesday at 11 am if that creates better Focus Time for both of us.

Clockwise Features

• Flexible holds for tasks and routines that adjust as your schedule changes
• Team-wide calendar intelligence that respects everyone’s preferences
• Smart meeting breaks to prevent back-to-back meeting fatigue
• Scheduling links for simplified external meeting coordination
• Slack integration for scheduling and status updates
• No-meeting day protection to create company-wide focus time
• Team analytics to track focus time versus meeting time

Clockwise Price

14. Airfocus

Airfocus is a product management platform built around prioritization and roadmapping.

Airfocus’s differentiation is how it connects strategy to execution.

Your OKRs link directly to your roadmap, which links to your backlog items. You can trace a single user story all the way up to a company objective.

I think the Priority Poker feature will pique your interest in Airfocus.

It’s similar to the collaborative decision-making we saw on Monday.com but more structured. Team members independently score items, and then compare their ratings to surface misalignments before they become problems.

I’ve found scoring frameworks essential for objective prioritization.

Airfocus lets you build custom frameworks that match your specific evaluation criteria—whether that’s effort vs. impact like the Agile Matrix or something more complex.

Airfocus Features

• Custom scoring frameworks for objective prioritization
• Priority Poker for collaborative decision-making
• Portfolio management to see cross-team priorities
• OKRs that connect directly to roadmap items
• Multiple views (Board, Timeline, Gantt, Chart)
• Capacity planning to align priorities with resources
• Integrations with Jira, Trello, Asana, and more

Airfocus Price

15. TimeHero

TimeHero is an AI-powered work management platform that automatically plans when you’ll work on tasks based on your actual availability.

TimeHero solves the “when will I actually do this?” problem.

It examines your calendar, looks at your tasks, and builds a realistic daily plan that adapts automatically when things change.

If someone drops a meeting on your calendar, TimeHero reschedules your tasks without you lifting a finger.

I like this a lot because it forces you to confront reality. You can’t pretend you’ll get twelve hours of work done in an eight-hour day when the system is actively scheduling those hours.

TimeHero distinguishes between “due dates” and “do dates” – a concept I wish more tools would adopt. It doesn’t just tell you when something’s due; it tells you specifically when you’ll work on it.

The recurring task handling is clever.

TimeHero’s recurring tasks are adaptive. A task that repeats “once a week” will find the optimal time each week based on your changing schedule.

TimeHero Features

• Automatic task scheduling based on calendar availability
• Risk detection for tasks that might miss deadlines
• Smart recurring tasks that adapt to your schedule
• Time tracking with multi-tasking support
• Workflow templates with dependencies
• Team workload and capacity visualization
• Integrations with Google, Microsoft, and 1000+ apps via Zapier

TimeHero Price

Prioritization Is Decision-Making in Disguise

The tools I’ve described aren’t really about organizing tasks. They’re about forcing decisions.

Most productivity advice fails because it assumes you already know what matters.

But you don’t.

Not really.

Your brain is perfectly designed to trick you into working on the wrong things.

What these tools do—the good ones, anyway—is create decision architectures that make it harder to lie to yourself.