One cool small invention in engineering management is the p0, p1, p2, p3, p4 priority scale.

It compresses a lot of social and operational context into two characters. Lower number means higher priority. More importantly, priority is tied to action. If something is p0, somebody needs to do something.

But there is another scale I want for personal knowledge work: i0, i1, i2, i3, i4.

The i stands for interest. Priority is for actions. Interest is for attention.

  • If p0 means “act now”, i0 means “do not lose this”.
  • If p1 means “schedule work”, i1 means “read soon”.
  • If p2 means “do later”, i2 means “useful context”.
  • If p3 means “low priority work”, i3 means “weak signal”.
  • If p4 means “almost never work”, i4 means “almost never revisit”.

This is useful when you need to rank interest concisely across many topics, sources, or articles.

For example, you might follow several sources about the same broad topic. One source is must-read, another is useful background, and another is only worth keeping around for occasional context. They are all about the same thing, but they do not deserve the same amount of attention.

I use this for myself in Scoop, a news intelligence system I am building to collect articles, group related ones, and rank how much attention they deserve.