The spreadsheet’s deepest problem isn’t any single missing feature. It’s that it’s dead between the moments you open it. The scores are computed the instant you hit recalculate and then they sit there, frozen, while the actual world keeps moving. A deadline that should be climbing toward urgency all afternoon doesn’t climb; it waits for you to come back and refresh it. Nothing updates unless you make it update.

What solved it was continuous computation. TaskBeacon runs the same ranking logic you already understand, the blend of task and project and domain, the two-tier deadline pressure, the hiding of what isn’t ready, but it runs it constantly, in the background, whether or not you’re looking. A deadline’s pressure rises through the day on its own. The moment a blocking task gets checked off, the thing it was blocking becomes eligible and surfaces, without you touching anything. You open the app and what you see is current, not a snapshot from the last time you remembered to recalculate. The engine, I call it TaskPulse, is just the scoring model from this guide, alive instead of frozen.