Momentum draws on decades of trusted-system practice — capture everything, decide once, review weekly. The tool enforces the skeleton; these are the habits that put muscle on it.
If something stays in your head longer than two breaths, it goes in the Inbox. The point of capture isn't organization — it's unloading, so your attention stops rehearsing open loops. Capture sloppy: "sarah phase 2" is a perfectly good inbox item, because triage is where clarity happens, and with AI triage clarity is cheap. The habit to build: ⌃Space without looking up from what you were doing.
The single biggest reason tasks stall is that they aren't actions — they're outcomes wearing an action's clothes. "Plan the offsite" isn't doable; "email Dana three venue options" is. When you catch yourself avoiding a task, don't schedule it harder — rewrite it smaller. Start with a verb, name the first physical step, and let the Stale view catch the ones you got wrong.
The when-date is your plan; the deadline is the world's. Two rules keep them useful: never give a task a deadline it doesn't really have (fake urgency trains you to ignore red), and treat moving a when-date as planning, not failure. If Today keeps rolling over, the problem isn't discipline — it's that you're scheduling for an imaginary ten-hour day. Time-block the big items against your real calendar and let the small ones fill the gaps.
Not every hour is a deep-work hour, and pretending otherwise produces evenings of guilty scrolling. When you're depleted, open Quick & Easy and take the top item — no browsing. Completion is the cheapest way to restart a stalled afternoon, which is the entire reason the view exists.
Handing something off without a follow-up date isn't delegating, it's wishing. Every delegated item goes to Waiting For with the date you'll chase it. Your action lists stay yours; other people's work stops haunting them.
Someday is a decision, not a dumping ground. Park things there freely and without guilt — that's what it's for — but let the weekly review resurface them. If an item survives three reviews untouched, it's usually a Drop wearing a Someday costume. Deleting it is allowed. Recommended, even.
Everything above degrades gracefully if you skip a day. The weekly review is the one non-negotiable: it's where stalled projects get caught, where Stale empties, where the system re-earns your trust. Book the same 30 minutes every week, on your calendar, with a time block. The week you most want to skip it is the week it has the most to tell you.
The Inbox becomes a to-do list. You're working out of the pile
instead of emptying it. Fix: triage daily, even three minutes' worth.
Today becomes a wish list. Sixteen items, six done, ten
demoralizing. Fix: schedule six, finish six, pull more from Anytime when they're
gone.
Deadline pollution. Everything's red, nothing's urgent. Fix:
strip every deadline that has no real-world consequence.
Review skipping. Two missed reviews and the system starts
lying to you. Fix: shrink the review, don't skip it — even ten minutes keeps
the trust alive.