Cleanup is lighter here than on paper, but not entirely hands-off. Glance at Today for anything tagged #start that’s shown up, that’s your signal to move it to its real list and clear the placeholder date before it sits there looking like something overdue. Beyond that, the one other thing worth a quick look is anything you finished without checking off, it happens in any system, paper or digital, so give your lists a glance before you build the hot list.
Building the hot list. Open the Today smart list first. It already shows everything due today or overdue, across every list, except anything tagged #start, that just means it became startable today, not that it’s actually due, so process those into their real list instead (per the cleanup step above) rather than adding them here. Add everything else in Today to your hot list before you look at a single project list, the same rule as paper, a real deadline doesn’t care which list it’s in.
Then work through your lists in order, front to back, the same way you’d walk a binder, one lap at a time. Open each list, sorted by priority, and flag one or two things if anything genuinely belongs on today’s list. You don’t have to flag anything from every list. If nothing there earns a spot, move to the next list anyway, you looked, you decided, that’s a real decision. Flag, don’t set a due date, to mark something for today. Giving a task a due date just to pull it forward is due date inflation sneaking back in, the same trap from Part 1, a flag means “I chose this for today,” a due date should only ever mean a real deadline. Cap yourself at two per project per lap, even when a list is tempting, and if the hot list still needs more once you’ve reached the end, go back to the top and do another lap until you have ten items on your hotlist. Once you’re done, your hot list is just the Flagged smart list, one tap, no separate list to maintain.
That’s the whole method, translated to a digital platform: the same ranking-once, walking-in-order discipline as paper, with dates and cross-cutting tags handled for you instead of by hand. It asks less of you day to day than paper does, but the one thing that actually makes this a real prioritization system, the ordering you did once at setup, is still entirely yours to build and trust.