How I decide what to build next (when everything seems urgent)

Solo builders drown in their own backlog. Every idea seems urgent because the only voice prioritising is mine, and mine whispers. I built a scoring habit to make the whispers comparable.

The four questions, scored 0–2

Reach: how many real users touch this? Not "could someday" — this quarter, real logs.

Depth: how much does it improve their experience? A fix for a daily pain scores higher than a polish for a monthly task.

Confidence: how sure am I it works as imagined? Evidence from users beats my enthusiasm; my enthusiasm has a record.

Effort (inverted): what does it cost me? A week of build season, or an afternoon?

The top-scoring item is next. It's not sophisticated, but it defeats the two biases that actually run my head: shiny-new-idea syndrome and squeaky-wheel syndrome.

The exceptions that override the score

Trust repairs skip the queue. Anything broken that users can see gets fixed now — reputation compounds downward fast.

Sequencing beats scoring sometimes. Some things unlock three other things; the unlock goes first even if its own score is modest.

The system's real job isn't finding the best idea. It's making me finish the chosen one before rescoring.