Today & Inbox

These are the two views you’ll have docked in your sidebar 90% of the time. They answer two different questions, both important:

Today — what am I doing right now?
Inbox — what’s piled up that I haven’t decided about?

Most days, Today is your work surface and Inbox is your morning-coffee surface.

Today

Open via Cmd+Shift+D, the ribbon icon (check-square), or Pensum: Open Today view from the command palette.

Three groups

Group	What it shows	How it’s sorted
Overdue	Tasks with a due date before today and status still open (`- [ ]` or `- [/]` in-progress)	Priority high → low, then oldest due date first
Today	Tasks due today, scheduled today, or open with no due date but scheduled today or earlier	Priority high → low, then due date soonest
Completed today	Tasks you’ve marked done today, with strikethrough styling	Most recently completed first

Overdue shows at the top intentionally — you want to see what’s slipping before you decide what to add to your day.

Interacting with tasks

Click anywhere on a task line → opens the task edit modal (description, dates, priority, tags)
Click the checkbox → toggles complete inline; the task moves to “Completed today” with strikethrough
Right-click → quick actions menu: Complete, Reschedule (Today / Tomorrow / +3 days / Next week / Pick date…), Edit, Open source file, Delete
Drag the task onto a Calendar view day cell → reschedules
Status bar at the bottom (“3 today, 2 overdue”) is always visible and click-jumps you to the Today view

Common patterns

Morning standup with yourself. Open Today first thing. Scan Overdue: is anything in there actually still important, or should some of it be archived or rescheduled? Then look at Today: what’s the order? Anything you should defer to tomorrow?
Working through the day. Stay in Today. Complete checkboxes as you go. Completed-today shows you what you’ve accomplished.
End of day. What’s left in Today that’s actually unfinished? Right-click → Reschedule → Tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Today starts clean.

What Today doesn’t show

Tasks scheduled in the future (those live in Forecast)
Tasks with no date and no scheduled date (those live in Inbox)
Completed tasks from previous days (those live in Activity)

This is deliberate. Today is for the now — everything else has its own view.

Inbox

Open via the command palette: Pensum: Open Inbox view.

The Inbox view shows every open task in your configured Inbox files (default: Tasks/Inbox.md — list more as comma-separated paths under Settings → General). Sorted newest first so the most recent captures are at the top.

What “Inbox” means here

An inbox file is a file you’ve designated as a triage staging area. Anything captured via Quick Add (Cmd+Shift+A) or Capture from selection (Cmd+Shift+T) lands in the first inbox file. The Inbox view is the lens for “what have I captured that I haven’t decided about yet?”

Once a task gets assigned to a project — either by editing the file and moving the line into a project file, or by adding #project/name, or by accepting a Smart Triage suggestion — it disappears from Inbox. It hasn’t gone anywhere; it just no longer counts as “unprocessed.”

Triage flow

Open Inbox, scan the list. For each task:

Decide if it’s real. Some captures turn out to be nothing once you see them in context. Delete the line.
Decide if it’s actionable now. If yes, give it a due date (drag to Calendar, or edit modal). If it’s a someday/maybe, leave it in the inbox or move it to a “someday” project file.
Decide where it belongs. If it’s part of a project, assign it (manually or via Smart Triage). Inbox should not be the long-term home of a task.

A well-tended Inbox is empty most of the time. A bloated Inbox is a sign that capture is outpacing triage — which is fine for a week or two, but worth flagging to yourself if it’s chronic.

Smart Triage (Pro)

Click Suggest Projects at the top of the Inbox view. Pensum sends each task description plus your list of projects to the AI. The model returns one suggestion per task, with a confidence level (high / medium / low):

[ HIGH ] Send pricing deck to client → acme
[ MED  ] Schedule follow-up with legal → general-ops
[ LOW  ] Read the new compliance memo → (no confident match)

Per task you can:

Accept → the task moves from the inbox file to the project file (or gets #project/name added if it’s already in a meeting note)
Skip → no change

Low-confidence suggestions are deliberately conservative — the prompt tells the model to prefer “no match” over a weak guess. You won’t get noise.

See Smart Triage for the full mechanics.

Why Inbox tasks move on accept

Triaging a task means committing to where it lives. If a project owns the task, the project file is the canonical home — that’s where the project dashboard and project-page panel will look for it. Leaving “assigned” tasks in the inbox file would let the Inbox count drift up forever even after triage.

The exception is tasks in meeting notes. Those stay in the meeting note (because the meeting is the source of truth for what was committed there) and get a #project/name tag instead. Project views aggregate via both containment and the tag, so the task still appears in the project’s dashboard.

Defaults summary

Setting	Default	Where to change
Inbox files	`Tasks/Inbox.md`	Settings → General → Vault and paths → Inbox files
Today hotkey	Cmd+Shift+D	Settings → Hotkeys
Completed task visibility	24 hours	Settings → General → Views → Completed task visibility
Default view on plugin activation	Today	Settings → General → Views → Default view