| name | surface-stale-tasks |
| description | Flags to-dos from your task manager that may have gone stale (7+ days in your Today list, 21+ days anywhere else), using a full-detail export that includes each item's creation date. Read-only, conversational, never edits your task manager. Standalone, or run as a step from start-the-day. Trigger: /surface-stale-tasks, or asking to check for stale/forgotten tasks.
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Surface Stale Tasks
Purpose
Tasks can sit forgotten in a task manager - this is a nudge to notice, not a
demand to act. It never edits your task manager itself; you decide what to do
with anything flagged.
Deliberately uses a full-detail export rather than any human-readable
snapshot note you might also keep (see update-tasks) - a snapshot built for
readability may drop fields like creation date to stay scannable, but this
skill needs creation date to judge staleness. Don't substitute a trimmed-down
snapshot here even if it's faster to read; if it's missing the field this
skill depends on, the staleness check will be wrong.
Trigger
/surface-stale-tasks, or asking to check for stale/forgotten tasks. Also
invoked as a step by /start-the-day.
Process
- Pull two views from your task manager: your current "Today" list, and
every open item across all lists. Both should include each item's
creation date. Exactly how you get this out (AppleScript, an API call, a
CLI export) is specific to your tool -
skills/things3-export/ has
example scripts for Things3 on macOS.
- From the Today list, flag anything whose creation date is 7+ days
old - if it's been sitting in Today a week, it's probably not actually
getting done there.
- From the full list, flag anything 21+ days old, excluding items
already flagged from the Today list, so nothing is surfaced twice.
- Present these conversationally as "these look like they might have gone
stale" - not a demand. Ask if the user wants to move any forward, drop
them, or leave them as-is.
- If nothing is stale by these thresholds, just say so briefly rather than
forcing the conversation.
- Adjust the 7/21-day thresholds to taste - they're a starting point, not a
law.
Guardrails
- Never edit the task manager - no marking done, no rescheduling, no
retagging. That's the user's action to take, in the tool that owns that
state.
- Never offer to make the change for them, even as a convenience - this
skill only ever reads.
