Before you touch the hot list, spend a few minutes catching the binder up to what’s actually true.
Check the calendar for anything that can start today. If a start date has arrived, move that task out of its project’s Blocked zone and into the zone it belongs in. This is the only place anything moves on its own, everything else stays put until you act on it.
Cross off anything that got finished without being crossed off. It happens. Catch it now, before you build anything on top of a page that isn’t telling the truth yet.
Then process your catch-list as mentioned above, filling out the columns and transferring the tasks to the correct locations.
Start with anything due today or already overdue, regardless of the domain or project, by checking the calendar first, and pull every one of those onto the hot list before you open a single project page.
Then work through the binder in order, front to back, one lap at a time. On each page, glance at what’s there, starting with the High zone, and pull one or two things onto the hot list if anything genuinely belongs there today until you have ten items on your list. You don’t have to pull anything. If nothing on a page earns a spot, move to the next page anyway, you looked, you decided nothing there needed to be on today’s list, and that’s a real decision, not something slipping past you unseen. This is also why the walk goes in a fixed, physical order instead of a loose scan of whatever pages happen to catch your eye: left to itself, your attention gravitates toward whatever’s freshest in memory, the thing you were just thinking about, not the thing that actually matters most. Walking the binder in the order you set up once at the start is what keeps a merely-recent task from crowding out a genuinely important one.
Cap yourself at two per page per lap, even when a page is tempting. This is what keeps one appealing project from filling the whole hot list before you’ve reached the second page. If a page has more worth pulling, it’ll still be there next lap. The same instinct that makes you grab the first good-enough option instead of comparing everything, the shortcut your mind takes when a list gets too long to hold at once, is exactly what this cap exists to interrupt. Two at a time forces you to keep moving instead of settling into one page and calling it a day.
Once you’ve gone all the way through the binder, if the hot list still needs more, go back to the front and do another lap. Same rule each time: look, pull zero to two, keep moving. Stop once the hot list has ten items, or once a full lap goes by without pulling anything at all.
If you finish that list before the day is done, go ahead and make another. If you don’t finish the list by the end of the day, scrap it and build a new one tomorrow.
That’s the whole method. It asks more of you than a spreadsheet does, but it asks nothing of a screen, and for a lot of people, that trade is worth making.