Setup

1. Open TaskBeacon in your browser at app.taskbeacon.net. It’s free, with no account to create and nothing to install. Your tasks live in your browser, and if you use Chrome, Edge, Brave or Arc, you can also connect them to a file on your own computer from Settings, so they sit somewhere you control rather than only inside the browser. (Brave asks you to switch the feature on first.)
2. The first time you open it, there’s one task waiting for you: download the starter tasks and import them in Settings → Data. The link is inside the task. A short set of lessons walks you through the app, one at a time, on a card in the corner, and about 80 example tasks show you what the Dashboard does with a list too long to read. You’ve already done a brain dump in Part 2, so the lessons near the end that ask for one will go quickly. When you’ve seen enough, delete the Examples task, and everything under it goes with it.
3. Create a task for each domain your life splits into, work, health, family, whatever those are for you, with an impact set relative to the other domains, not on some universal scale.
4. Create a task for each project you’ve already identified, with its parent set to the domain it belongs under, and an impact set relative to the other projects in that same domain.
5. Go through the task list you built in Parts 2 and 3, one task at a time, and create each one in TaskBeacon, with its parent set to whichever project or domain it belongs under, and an impact set relative to the other tasks in that same space. That’s the task’s own impact, and it’s the name you’ll see in the app. Add a blocker, a start date, a due date, or a tag to anything that has one.

Domains, projects, and individual tasks are all the same underlying thing in TaskBeacon, just used differently depending on where they sit. A domain is really just a task with no parent, and a project is really just a task with other tasks nested under it. So don’t be thrown by the wording above: creating a domain or a project genuinely does mean creating a task.

6. Build a filter for anything you want the Dashboard to leave out or narrow down to, work tasks on the weekend, only tasks tagged “computer,” whatever matches how your day actually splits up. Save it. You can build more than one and switch between them depending on what you’re doing.

One more thing worth knowing now, even though we won’t use it until Part 5. Anything you create without choosing a parent lands in the Inbox. That’s TaskBeacon’s version of the catch-point: somewhere to drop a raw thought in seconds and give it its real shape later.