Focus Dashboard + Category-Balance Gate — 2026-09-22

Task: Focus-dashboard-upgrade (Core/Processes/Projects/KB-OS/Tasks/), 3 rounds, rock: off.

What changed

Core/DASHBOARD.md

Current Tasks/Projects Bases view: limit: 10 added, and the real cause of “only shows 5” fixed — the file.mtime recency filter was 14 days, not a display cap (the view’s own “N results” label was reporting the true filter match count). Widened to 30 days.
Biggest Rocks table: added a Category column (Strategy/Development/Marketing/Systems), then dropped the separate Business column on Talbot’s call — business is now shown inline next to the Rock name instead.
Intro line reworded to Talbot’s wording: “Focus reminder: BIG Rocks ONLY. BIGGEST First. Strategy > Development > Marketing”.
Added a callout pointing at the Focus project (rock-alignment gate, ledger, Routines).

Core/_WorkingOn/Tasks/DASHBOARD.md

Deleted the “By Risk Level” Bases view (Talbot: not valuable).
Active Projects (finite) view: added file.name as the first ordered column, so each row now links directly to its STATUS.md.

Category-balance gate (~/ai-config/claude/commands/task-start.md §4c, new)

Talbot’s stated priority order is Strategy > Development > Marketing, Dev > Mktg within that. First attempt (round 2) weighted this into the per-task rock-alignment decision itself; Talbot rejected that as too blunt — “not all tasks are in these three categories.”
Redesigned as an aggregate check, same shape as the focus-ledger’s existing >50%-off-after-10-rows rule: every task is classified silently (category: frontmatter — Strategy/Development/Marketing/Other), no per-task stop. A forced choice only fires when the rolling-10-task Other count exceeds 4, or the Rocks table’s out-of-category share exceeds 1/3.
focus-ledger.md gained a Category column (21 pre-existing rows backfilled —); /task-complete §7c now writes it going forward.
Generalized into Core/Processes/Behavioural-Solutions.md §8 as a standing design pattern: aggregate-ratio gates beat per-decision weighting when not every instance should match the criterion.

Talbot confirmed the rendered Rocks table and row count in Obsidian (“good”).
Deployed ~/.claude/commands/task-start.md grepped live to confirm the gate text landed.

Rock #5 (KB-OS cleanup) categorizes as Systems, the category Talbot said he wants to reduce time on — Talbot’s call: stays as-is.
A “check the Bases result-count label before assuming a display cap” LESSONS candidate was proposed but declined by Talbot at close — not promoted anywhere.