Advanced Features

Flowcus Radar

Radar analyses your open tasks each day and presents the 3–5 you should focus on, scored by urgency, momentum, and neglect — with clear reasons why each one ranked. It surfaces what matters so you can start your day with confidence rather than scanning your entire board.

How scoring works

Each task starts at 0 points. Points are added or subtracted based on these factors:

What each reason means

• Overdue — This task is past its due date. It's the strongest signal that something needs action.
• Due today — The deadline is today. Handle it before it becomes overdue.
• Aging — This task has been sitting around for over a week. It may be something you keep putting off.
• Flagged — You explicitly marked this task as important in your task manager.
• Momentum — This task is in your active (Doing) column but hasn't moved in over 3 days. It may be stuck.
• Neglected — The project this task belongs to hasn't had any completions in 5+ days. The whole project may need attention.
• Blocked — Something is preventing progress. The -5 penalty pushes blocked tasks down the list since you can't act on them right now.

What's excluded

The Radar only scores incomplete, non-dropped tasks. Tasks in the Done or Dropped columns are never shown.

Ghost Tasks

Ghost Detection finds the tasks you've been avoiding — the vaguely defined ones, the stale ones, and the ones that slipped backward — and prompts you to deal with them before they become dead weight.

A task becomes a ghost when it matches one or more of these criteria:

1. Stale — The task hasn't been modified in a while. For tasks in active columns, this means more than 7 days without a change. For tasks in queue or backlog columns, the threshold is 14 days (since these are expected to sit longer).

2. Vague — The task name is too short or lacks a clear action verb. "Taxes" is vague; "File tax return" is not. Flowcus uses a clarity scoring system to evaluate task names and flag those that are ambiguous.

3. Moved Backward — The task was moved from a later column to an earlier one in the last 30 days, signalling regression rather than progress.

4. Sparse — The task has no notes and no subtasks, and was created more than 3 days ago. New tasks get a grace period, but older tasks with no detail are worth reviewing.

Each criterion contributes to a severity score. Ghosts are visually highlighted on the board at two tiers:

• Low severity: The task matches one criterion (e.g. stale)
• High severity: The task matches multiple criteria (e.g. stale and vague)

Snoozing Ghosts

If a ghost is flagged but you're not ready to deal with it yet, you can snooze it. Right-click on a ghost task and choose "Snooze Ghost" to dismiss the ghost highlight temporarily. The task will reappear as a ghost after the snooze period expires.

The following tasks are never flagged as ghosts:

• Completed or dropped tasks
• Tasks deferred until a future date
• Snoozed tasks
• Tasks without a board position