FeaturesShared workspacesFor teamsChatGPT & ClaudeMCP serverFree toolsTimersStopwatchPomodoroCountdownShared timerProduct tourBlogPricingLog in
Free random picker

Pick a name.
Or split the room.

Paste a list, press the button. Genuinely random, readable from a distance, and nothing to install.

6 in the hat

Timing them too? Classroom timer.

✦ Under the hood

Random is harder than it looks.

Most pickers reach for Math.random() and a remainder. That is fine for a shuffle animation and wrong for a draw: the remainder of a raw random number is very slightly biased toward the low end of the list, so the first names come up more often than the last ones. Nobody notices in ten picks and everybody notices in a term.

This draws from the browser’s cryptographic source and discards the values that would skew the result, so every name has the same chance every time. It also spins for about a second before settling — not decoration, but because an instant answer from a machine reads as arbitrary, and people trust a draw they watched happen.

✦ What it is for

What people pick with it.

Whose turn it is

Standups, reading aloud, presenting. The clock is neutral in a way that picking a face is not.

Teams and pairs

Split a class or a workshop without anybody being chosen last.

Raffles and giveaways

Turn on removing and draw as many winners as you need.

Settling it

Where to eat, who goes first, which idea to try. Faster than another round of discussion.

Retro and workshop order

Randomising who speaks first changes what gets said.

Chores and rotas

The fairest arbiter in the house is one that has no opinion.

✦ The bigger decision

Random is fine for whose turn it is.
It is a terrible way to choose priorities.

A picker is honest about being arbitrary, which is exactly why it works for turns and fails for work. The reason your week feels random is not that you drew it from a hat — it is that nothing is deciding what matters more than anything else.

EvyOS is that decision made once and written down: goals at the top, the projects that serve them, and the tasks underneath, so what to do next is a consequence rather than a coin toss.

Questions

The picker, answered.

Yes, and this is worth being fussy about because people use these to decide who presents and who does the washing up. It draws from the browser's cryptographic random source rather than Math.random, and rejects values that would bias the result — taking a remainder of a raw random number quietly favours the low end unless you handle it, which is the bug most pickers have.
Yes. Turn on removing and each pick takes that name out of the list, which is what you want for handing out turns or drawing raffle winners. Leave it off and everybody stays in the hat.
It shuffles the whole list and then deals it out round-robin, so team sizes differ by at most one and nobody is left in a group of one. Shuffle again for a different arrangement.
No. The names live in the page while it is open and are gone when you close it. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no account.
Full screen makes the result large enough to read from the back of a room, which is the usual reason this gets opened.

Picking is the easy decision.
The rest of them are not.

EvyOS holds the goals, projects and tasks that decide what anybody should be doing next.

Start for free