Urgency & Top of Mind

The urgency scale

Every item has an urgency from 1 to 5. The AI scores items from streams automatically; you can press ! on a selected item to cycle it manually.

• 1 — Irrelevant. Things you almost certainly won’t act on. Marketing email, automated notifications, FYI mentions, “someone else handled it” updates. With the Holding Area on, these get tucked away for batch review instead of cluttering your loop.
• 2 — Low. Routine, non-blocking. A receipt to file, a meeting invite for next month, a comment that doesn’t need a reply.
• 3 — Medium. The default. Deserves attention soon but isn’t on fire. Most real work lives here.
• 4 — Important. Time-sensitive, or someone is actively waiting on you.
• 5 — Urgent. Drop everything. A real emergency, a hard deadline today. Triggers a push notification by default.

Stream-generated items default low. The AI is instructed to err lower, not higher — “someone wants your attention” is not urgency.

Push notifications are configurable per stream (see Streams → Notifications per stream). For summarizer streams (Gmail, GitHub, Linear) you can lower the bar — e.g. notify any time the AI rates an item 3+ — or raise it to “5 only” for noisy sources. Items without a stream (manual notes, lookbacks) keep the default 5 threshold.

Visual urgency

Each level has its own color so you can scan the loop at a glance:

Urgency is also what pushes items through the “hidden stream” filter: hidden streams only surface items at urgency 4+.

Urgency ramp

If an item with a due date sits in the loop as that date approaches, Loopr ramps its urgency up automatically. This is the drift signal: things you keep ignoring become harder to ignore. Reset by completing, snoozing, or acting on it.

Top of Mind

Some items you don’t want in the loop at all — you want them pinned. Press t on a selected item to toggle it to top of mind.

TOM items appear in a separate grid above the main loop. They don’t rotate through. They don’t get scrolled past. They stay visible until you mark them done or take them back off TOM.

A good TOM use case: the one thing you care about most this week, a concrete deliverable you want to see every time you open the app. A bad use case: 15 items. The whole point is visual weight; more than 3–4 defeats it.

T (uppercase) from the main loop jumps focus into the TOM grid; from there j/k/x/etc. work as expected, and Esc or T again returns to the loop.

Urgent mode vs. working hours

There’s a user-level overtime mode (Profile → Overtime). When off, items from scheduled streams only show during your working hours. Switch to overtime and Loopr ignores the schedule — useful when you’re working late and want to clear everything.

There’s also mindfulness mode — see Mindfulness.