Features — Time & Priority Management Tools

How the features fit together

Big rocks in first. One channel at a time.

Every feature below exists to do one of three jobs: get the heavy work in before the noise, rank what's left, or hand you a single thing to focus on.

Diagram: all tasks pour into a funnel in three weights, big rocks carrying the most; Red Urchin sits in the throat and ranks them; channels deliver singular focus. — Big rocks → Red Urchin → channels → singular focus.

Big rocks go in first. Goals, recurring tasks and calendar-linked meetings claim their place before the small stuff arrives. Put them in last and they never fit at all.

Red Urchin ranks the rest. Everything you capture — tasks, follow-ups, delegations, notes — lands on one To Do Today page, takes an A/B priority, and reorders itself with a single click of the urchin button.

Channels deliver one thing at a time. Your page tells you the next action, not all forty of them. Finish it, mark it complete, move to the next.

More on Big Rocks → More on Channels →

The core page

To Do Today (TDT)

A dedicated virtual page for every date — the central place your day starts and ends.

Three task sections

Main, Outside Activities and Due From Others — same functionality in each, split so your own work and the work you're waiting on never blur together. Put a delegate against a row and you can see at a glance who owes you what.

A/B priority, auto-renumbered

Set A1, B2 and so on. Insert a duplicate priority and every other row renumbers itself — no manual reshuffling.

Drag and drop rows

Reorder any row, or drag a task onto a date in the rail to move it — priority clears automatically on the move.

Calendar panel

Your linked calendar (Google or Microsoft 365) beside your tasks — working hours by default, scrollable to 24 hours, all-day items pinned to the top, overlapping meetings side by side. Click an empty slot to add an entry with an optional reminder and it's written back to your real calendar; meetings you've logged appear here too.

Action menu per row

Mark complete, move to date, set font colour, change reference, set recurring, add a calendar entry, or delete — all from one menu.

Attachments

Attach documents to any row via the paperclip icon, kept with the entry through moves and recurrence.

Time per task, totalled per section

Put a duration in minutes against any row. Each section header adds up the minutes still outstanding, so the page tells you how much of the day you have already committed before you say yes to anything else.

Reference linking

Type C, G, M or N in the Ref cell, pick the page, and the row takes a short code derived from it — C/BJ for a Communications page called Bob Jones. The code is a live link straight back to that page.

Tidy Up, and the bold next task

The urchin button strips blank rows and re-sorts each section — unfinished first, A1 → A → B1 → B → unprioritised, completed below. The lowest unfinished A in each section stays bold: the one thing to do next.

Smaller details on the same page

✓
Colour and highlight coding. Three font colours — red, blue and green — plus yellow and orange highlights, applied to any row from the action menu. Click the same swatch again to clear it. Enough to code a page at a glance, not enough to turn it into a rainbow.
✓
A notes box on every date. Headed Results / Achievements / Thoughts / Notes, it sits beneath the task sections and belongs to that day — somewhere to close the day out, not just plan it. Separate from your Notes subpages, which are organised by subject.
✓
Completed rows stay put. Finished work greys out and strikes through rather than vanishing, so the page still shows what the day actually took — until Tidy Up moves it below the live work.

Subpages

Communications, Goals, Meetings, Notes

Purpose-built pages that write straight back to your To Do Today list — and read back from it. Tick the task off on your daily page and the follow-up row on the call, meeting or goal it came from ticks off too. Nothing is tracked in two places, and nothing is updated twice.

Follow-ups from every subpage land on one page — alongside the work and personal tasks you capture directly.

Communications

Log type, date, subject and outcome for every call, email or conversation. The follow-up (F/U) button opens a mini calendar, creates the task on the day you pick, and marks whether it's your action or due back from someone else.

Goals

Action, delegate, resources, start date and duration per goal, with a time-activate setting that creates the task on your TDT page exactly when it's due.

Meetings

Agenda items with type, outcome and owner, automatic calendar entries, an outcomes section, and F/U items that flow to the right person's TDT page.

Notes

A full rich-text notes page per subject, separate from the daily notes box on your TDT page.

Contacts stay in sync

Link a Google or Microsoft 365 contact to a Communications page and it becomes the source of truth — name, phone, email and address update automatically, no re-typing.

Summary & active/inactive

Every subpage has a sortable, searchable summary — active items grouped first. Toggle any subpage inactive to grey it out and lock it, without losing the history.

Automation

Recurring tasks and automatic forwarding.

Set any task to repeat daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, in any combination — every instance carries its priority, reminders and attachments with it, just like a calendar recurrence. Edit an occurrence and you get the choice a calendar gives you: this task only, or this and every future one. Each day can hold its own priority for the same recurring task, because Tuesday's version of a job isn't always as urgent as Friday's.

Automatic Task Forwarding (in Settings) moves every uncompleted task from before a date you choose onto a new date, so nothing quietly falls off the list. Missed occurrences of recurring tasks come across too, each one labelled with the date it was originally due — so a fortnight of skipped gym sessions arrives honestly, rather than disappearing.

Daily / weekly / monthly / yearly This task only, or this and future Per-day priorities on a series Forwarding rules in Settings

Recurring — Weekly

A1Submit status report

A1Submit status reportnext Mon

A1Submit status report+1 week

Everywhere you work

Synced everywhere you sign in.

Web app

Runs in your browser at go.red-urchin.com — no download, no app store. Install it to your home screen or dock in two taps, and it opens and works with no connection, syncing when you are back online.

Your data stays yours

Your Google or Microsoft login stays in your browser — we never see or store it.

Export

Print any page to PDF straight from the browser, with a dedicated export screen on the way.

Diagram: work, learning, relationships, emotional, physical and personal demands all push into one matrix of desire versus need and big versus small, resting on a fulcrum labelled balance. — Every demand lands in the same four boxes — and the whole matrix balances on one fulcrum.

Balance

Not just your work day. All of it.

A system that only holds your job isn't holding your life. Red Urchin takes every input — work, learning, relationships, physical, emotional, personal — and sorts it on two axes: what you need to do against what you desire to do, big against small.

Strategies and goals live in Goals. Daily tasks and sub-tasks live on your To Do Today page. Your 10s, 25s, 50s and 100s get scheduled like everything else — because if you don't book them, the noise takes the time instead.

Need vs desire Big vs small Every part of life

How balance works →

New: Micro Goals

Turn "I should do this more" into a scheduled task.

A weekly and monthly layer sitting between your long-term Goals and your daily To Do Today page — for the things that aren't a deadline, they're a frequency.

A long-term goal has a target date. A daily task has a day. Neither of those shapes fits "call three clients a week" or "two sessions at the gym" — the commitments that quietly decide how a year turns out. Micro Goals are built for exactly that shape, on their own page, with a weekly section and a monthly one.

Give a goal a target of up to seven for the period and each one becomes a box. Click a box and Time Activate turns it into a real task on a date you choose inside that week or month, in either your Main or Outside Activities section. It isn't a tick in a tracker — it's a row on a specific day, sitting in the priority order with everything else competing for that day.

Status is never entered twice. A box turns grey the moment its task is scheduled and red the moment that task is completed on your To Do Today page, read live from the task itself. Delete the task on your daily page and the box quietly returns to waiting, because there's only ever one source of truth. Delete the whole micro-goal and any tasks it created are cleaned up with it.

Page back and forward through weeks and months to see what a period actually looked like. Starting a fresh one? Copy brings the previous period's goals forward in a click — titles and target counts only, never the completions, so you start the week honest.

Weekly & monthly sections Up to 7 instances per goal One click to schedule Status read live from the task Copy forward each period

Read the Micro Goals help article →

Monthly Micro Goals — Sep 2026

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completed scheduled still to find a day

Every page feeds the one that matters.