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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. From the full list, flag anything 21+ days old, excluding items already flagged from the Today list, so nothing is surfaced twice.
4. Present these conversationally as "these look like they might have gone stale" - not a demand. Two rules on how:
   • Don't dump the full list as prose. The 21+ day list can easily run to dozens of items, and a wall of text gets skimmed past. Summarise it by area or project with counts, and name only the handful that genuinely stand out (a deadline about to bite, anything over a year old).
   • Then stop and wait for an answer. Ask whether the user wants to move any forward, drop them, or leave them as-is, and end the turn there. Never ask and continue to the next step in the same message - when called from start-the-day, the caller must not move on to meetings until the user has actually replied. If they want to work through specific items, do that one at a time as structured questions rather than as another list.
5. If nothing is stale by these thresholds, just say so briefly rather than forcing the conversation.
6. 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.