Sort your unsorted feedback
A short recurring pass that takes everything you captured since last time and gets the pile back to empty. Twenty minutes, once a week, is the whole habit.
Use this when
- You have collected signals during the week and the count is climbing.
- Check has started naming how long the oldest one has been waiting.
- A planning cycle is about to start and you want the input in one place.
What you need before starting
- A status marked not on the roadmap yet — see Unsorted feedback.
- Some things sitting at it.
- Twenty uninterrupted minutes. This goes badly in five-minute pieces.
Step-by-step flow
Press Sort
Next to the Unsorted count on the canvas. It opens beside the roadmap, one signal at a time, so you are deciding in context rather than against a blank list.
Read it before deciding
The signal is shown as it was captured, with how long it has been waiting. No form, no fields — just what somebody said.
Promote what earns it
Answer four things: status, level, workstream, horizon. Nothing is guessed for you, because an unanswered level would quietly become an epic.
Check what it might already be
Triage offers items that share wording, and shows which words. Click one to merge straight into it. An empty list means nothing matched, not that the request is new.
Merge what you already have
The signal joins the existing item as evidence rather than becoming a second copy of the same request.
Write the no down
Declining asks for a reason and will not take an empty one. It is kept, not deleted — the Declined tab is where you find it when somebody asks again.
Leave what you genuinely cannot decide
It stays in the pile and keeps ageing. A signal you leave twice is a signal you have decided about without saying so.
Finish at zero
The counter should run out. If it does not, the pass did not finish.
The whole pass runs from the keyboard: 1–4 choose an exit, J and K move between signals, Esc backs out of a choice and then leaves.
What good looks like
- The Unsorted button has gone from the filter row, because nothing is waiting.
- Every signal that became an item has a level, a workstream and a horizon.
- Every signal that did not has a written reason you would be comfortable reading back to the person who asked.
- The roadmap looks the same as it did before you started, except for the items you deliberately added.
Common traps
- Sorting into "later". Moving a signal to a roadmap item with a Later horizon, to avoid saying no, is how the pile moves onto the roadmap instead of off it. Later is a commitment with a date attached; no is a decision.
- Promoting without deciding the level. An item with no level is treated as an epic, so skipping the question answers it for you — usually wrongly for something that arrived as one sentence.
- Sorting continuously. Doing one whenever it arrives means you decide each in isolation, with no sense of what else came in. The pile is useful precisely because it lets you see the week together.
- Never finishing. A pass that stops halfway leaves the oldest items oldest. If you cannot finish, start from the oldest next time too.