Momentum is opinionated. It's built around one loop — capture, triage, do — and a handful of views that keep that loop honest. This page explains the loop; the pages below explain everything the app doesn't spell out on its own.
Get everything out of your head and into the Inbox the moment it occurs to you — tasks, ideas, things to look up, things you're not sure about yet. On the Mac, ⌃Space opens Quick Entry from inside any app. On iPhone, use the quick-add bar or the widget. Don't organize while you capture. Don't decide anything. Type it, hit return, get back to what you were doing.
Once a day, empty the Inbox by making one decision per item. Is it actionable? If yes: do it now if it's tiny, delegate it and track it in Waiting For, or file it — into Today, a project, Anytime, or Upcoming with a date. If no: it's Reference material, a Someday idea, or trash. AI Triage (⌘T) suggests the routing for each item so a 20-item inbox takes a few minutes, not a sitting.
The point of triage is that nothing lives in the Inbox. It's a loading dock, not a warehouse.
Work from Today. When Today is done, pull from Anytime. When you're too depleted to face either, open Quick & Easy and take the top item. The other views exist precisely so that the list you work from stays short and honest.
Every task system decays: projects stall quietly, lists fill with things you're never going to do, and eventually you stop trusting the app and go back to keeping it all in your head. Momentum ships two mechanisms aimed at exactly that failure mode: the Stale view, which confronts you with anything that's sat unresolved for over a week, and the Weekly Review wizard, which walks every active project and makes you decide — keep, hold, or drop. Use both and the system stays truthful. Skip them and it's just another list app.