Task Velocity: Your Productivity Pulse

Most productivity tools tell you what you did. Task Velocity tells you whether you're keeping up. It's a single number — a multiplier — that reflects the ratio of tasks you've completed to tasks you've added over the past 30 days. Above 1.0x, you're ahead. Below 1.0x, your list is growing faster than you can clear it. Either way, it's honest.

What Task Velocity Measures

Task Velocity is the ratio of tasks you've completed to tasks you've created over the past 30 days. It's expressed as a multiplier — for example, 1.2x or 0.8x. If you completed 12 tasks and created 10, your velocity is 1.2x. If you completed 8 tasks and created 10, it's 0.8x. The window is always a rolling 30 days, so the score updates continuously as you work.

How to Read Your Score

A score above 1.0x means you're completing more than you're adding — your list is shrinking. A score below 1.0x means you're adding more than you're completing — your list is growing. A score of exactly 1.0x means the two are in balance.

Neither direction is automatically good or bad. A score below 1.0x during a heavy planning sprint is normal. A score below 1.0x sustained for weeks is a signal worth paying attention to. The number gives you the information; it's up to you to decide what it means.

Free vs. Premium Access

Premium feature. The historical Task Velocity chart is available on paid plans. Free users see their current score only.

Premium users can view a historical chart of their Task Velocity over time, giving the score context that a single number can't provide. The chart shows how velocity has moved across past 30-day windows, so you can see whether you're on an improving trend, a declining one, or holding steady.

To refine the chart, use the filter controls accessible from the gear icon on the velocity card. You can filter by Folder, Context, Priority, and Status. Filtering lets you isolate velocity for a specific area of your work — for example, filtering by a project folder to see whether that folder alone is driving the overall score up or down.

Improving Your Task Velocity

The most direct way to improve velocity is to make completion easier — which usually means reducing friction, not working harder. A few behaviors that tend to help:

Keep tasks small. Large, vague tasks tend to stall. A task titled "Website redesign" might sit for weeks, while "Draft homepage copy" gets done in an afternoon. Break work down until each task represents a single, doable action. The Break Any Project Down with Subtasks article covers this in depth.

Use due dates consistently. Tasks without dates are easy to defer indefinitely. When tasks have dates, they surface in Today's Focus and This Week, which makes them visible and harder to ignore.

Clear your completed list regularly. Tasks that are done but not marked complete still count against your velocity calculation. Complete tasks when you finish them.

Audit old tasks. If your list has tasks that are months old and still open, decide: complete them, break them into something actionable, or delete them. Tasks that will never be completed are noise, and they pull your score down every 30 days they remain open.

For a deeper read on what your score is actually telling you and how to act on it, see What Your Task Velocity Is Really Telling You.