Interactive, browser-based remakes of the analog self-assessment exercises popularized by What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard N. Bolles. Each is a single, self-contained page — no sign-up, no server, works offline, and saves your progress in your browser.
Live: https://anewt225.github.io/parachute/
Rank any list by the classic pairwise-comparison method: instead of trying to order everything at once, you judge one pair at a time — this, or that? — and the tool tallies the wins into a ranking.
- Enter any number of items and see the total number of comparisons up front, so the cognitive workload is never a surprise.
- One-pair-at-a-time flow with full keyboard control, plus the original triangular grid view with live tallies.
- Real tiebreakers — items that finish tied are re-compared (or, for a three-way-plus tie, ordered directly) rather than resolved silently.
- Express mode — an optional faster path that skips any comparison your earlier answers already imply (if A > B and B > C, it takes A > C as given), cutting a 10-item ranking from 45 comparisons to roughly 20.
- Clean export — copy or download the result as a plain numbered list.
| The ranked result | The grid view, with live tallies |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Setup shows the total number of comparisons up front, so the workload is never a surprise:
Ranking many things at once exceeds working memory (people reliably hold only ~3–4 items in mind at a time), which is why long ranked lists feel arbitrary. Comparing two things at a time keeps every decision inside that limit and forces explicit trade-offs, avoiding the "everything is high-priority" problem of rating scales.
The trade-off is volume: comparing every pair is O(n²) — 45 comparisons for 10 items. The express mode addresses that by exploiting transitivity (a binary-insertion ranking), which only ever asks what your previous answers haven't already settled, at O(n log n). The default full mode is kept because it also surfaces inconsistent preferences (A > B > C > A cycles) that the express mode assumes away.
- Zero dependencies. Plain HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript in one file per tool. Nothing to build, nothing to install.
- Offline-first. No network calls; state persists via
localStorage. - Accessible & responsive. Keyboard navigation, visible focus states,
prefers-reduced-motionsupport, and light/dark theming viaprefers-color-scheme. - A neutral slate palette with a single burnt-orange accent reserved for the active/selected state, so what's interactive always reads as interactive.
parachute/
├── index.html landing page
├── prioritizing-grid/
│ └── index.html the tool (self-contained)
├── README.md
└── LICENSE
Adding a tool = a new folder with its own index.html, plus a card on the landing page.
Everything is static, so just open a file in a browser — or serve the folder:
python -m http.server 8000
# then visit http://localhost:8000MIT © Alex Newton.
Original exercises inspired by What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard N. Bolles. This project is an independent, original reimplementation and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the book or its publisher.