With TaskBeacon, all you have to do is open the Dashboard, choose whichever filter matches what you’re doing right now, and there’s your hot list: the five or ten tasks that matter most, your choice of which. It’s up to the minute, and it updates every time you complete something, so you always have a short list to pick from. A task with a future start date, or one still waiting on an unfinished blocker, stays off it on its own until it’s ready. You don’t have to check for that yourself.

Each score also carries a short reason underneath it: the task’s own impact, its parent’s impact, or the fact that something important is waiting on it. That turns out to matter more than it sounds, and we’ll come back to why in Part 5.

That’s the whole setup. It keeps itself current from here. You don’t rebuild it or re-sort it. From here, the daily habit is opening the Dashboard and working the list it gives you.