It's been 23 days since you opened this. Maybe longer. You're not sure. You got slammed at work, or you got sick, or you hyperfocused on something else, or you went through something hard, or there's no reason at all and you just fell off. The brain wasn't here for a while.
Now you're thinking about opening the system again, and your finger is hovering over the icon. The dread is doing its thing. You can feel the shape of what's behind that icon: old to-dos that are now either stale or urgent, an energy log with a three-week gap, a dashboard that's lying to you about what's current. You can feel the catch-up that's waiting.
And so you don't open it. You close the tab. That's another day. The gap extends.
This is the most common failure mode in every productivity system ever built. Not the missed day. The 24th missed day, where the gap becomes the thing keeping you out.
Why catch-up was the wrong goal
The default model, in every other system: "you've been gone, here's what you missed, reconcile it." You go through the overdue tasks. You mark what's still real. You delete what isn't. You update the calendar. You re-prioritize. You spend 45 minutes putting the system back together before you can use it.
This is the wrong shape of work, for us, for three reasons.
It front-loads executive function at the moment you have least of it. The reason you fell off, usually, was that executive function was low. Coming back during a low-EF week and demanding 45 minutes of high-EF triage is asking the wrong thing.
It reinforces the shame that kept you out. The catch-up screen is the gap, made material. Every item on it is a small timestamped failure. You can't reconcile the system without looking at the gap, and looking at the gap is what you've been avoiding for 23 days. Catch-up is the wall you couldn't climb, with "catch-up" written on it.
Most of the catch-up work is pointless. A large fraction of tasks that were urgent 23 days ago have self-resolved, are no longer relevant, have been handled another way, or should be dropped outright. Reconciling them in detail is labor without return.
So we don't catch up. We re-enter.
The three prompts
Open the re-entry page. There are three questions. That's it.
1. Where are you right now?
One or two sentences. Not about the system. About you.
"Tired. Just got through a hard week of work, my kid's sick, I haven't been sleeping. Capacity feels low."
This is the most important prompt. The purpose is to locate yourself, as the person sitting down to re-enter, before touching any task. We often try to re-enter by pretending we're at the energy level we were at when we last opened the system. That's rarely true. Re-entering at a pretended capacity leads to taking on too much in the first 10 minutes and crashing out again by day 3. Naming where you are, honestly, calibrates what you'll do next.
2. What's actually live right now — the three things that matter this week?
Three items. Not your whole task list. Not what was on the list 23 days ago. The three things that matter now.
"Pay the car insurance before it lapses. Send the draft to M. Get to the dentist appointment Thursday."
Whatever the old task list said, it's not authoritative anymore. You are. Three items from you, right now, becomes what the dashboard shows tonight and tomorrow. Sometimes the three things are boring admin. Sometimes the right answer is "rest and don't push it" — which is itself a legitimate answer.
3. What are you letting go of, from before?
This is the dead letter prompt. The old list is going to have things on it that you're not going to do. Some of them you'll do later. Some you won't. For this prompt, name the "won't."
"The side project I was planning to launch in March. Not this year."
The purpose is to formally deposit some items into the dead letter office before you see them on the old list. Naming what you're letting go before you look at the stale list prevents those items from becoming barnacles when you do look. You've already decided. Seeing them is just confirmation.
That's it.
Three prompts. Three minutes, if you let yourself write short answers. Five if you're reflective. No 30-minute triage. No "overdue items" screen. No reset.
The reason this works is mechanical, not motivational. The failure mode of abandoned systems isn't that we forget they exist. It's that reopening them is emotionally expensive. The tab is loaded with every missed day and every task we didn't do. Lowering the re-entry cost below the re-entry dread is the entire game. Three prompts and three minutes is below the dread threshold for most of us, most of the time.
That's the design target.