I built this whole method by hand first. A text file, then spreadsheets, then more elaborate spreadsheets, each one better than the last, each one eventually running into a wall I couldn’t get past without leaving the platform behind. This part is the story of those walls, and what it took to get past them. It ends with the app I eventually built, TaskBeacon, not because you need it, everything in this guide works without it, but because it’s the honest end of the story, and because the walls I hit are the same ones you might hit if you run this system by hand for long enough. If you know what the walls are, you’ll recognize them when you reach them, and you’ll know what a tool has to do to be worth switching to.