My due list is full of things that are not real leads (stray .md files in your Booking HQ)

You ask Otto what needs you today, or you read the digest he wrote overnight, and most of what comes back is junk: half-sentences lifted out of some old file, sitting next to the two or three leads that actually matter. If your reaction was my due list shows things that aren't real, or you have been squinting at follow-ups that make no sense and cannot work out which client they belong to, you are not misreading anything. One performer reported it in exactly these words: whats_due is currently unreliable, most of its output is noise pulled from config/version-history files matched on generic status-vocabulary text, drowning out the real lead-level items. That was a real bug in the app. It is fixed, and this article covers the update, the one-minute workaround if you cannot update yet, and how to tell a bogus row from a real one.

Where the noise shows up

Everything that answers the question "what needs me" reads the same sweep, so the junk travels with it. That means the count and the list Otto gives you when you ask about follow-ups, the Daily digest he writes for you, and the Follow-up sweep schedule if you run one. Those same rows also reach the Due now list on your Today screen, where a junk row shows up wearing the reason gone quiet. And if one of the stray files happened to carry something that reads like a date, that row counted as late or coming due, which is the only kind the Mac Reminders sync ever copies out, so with that sync switched on it could escape into your Reminders app too. The rest of the app is unaffected: your Gig Desk, your Calendar, and your Inbox read your leads and conversations directly and never had this problem.

The fix: update to 1.11.12 or newer

The bug was found, traced, and fixed in version 1.11.12. Every version from 1.11.12 onward has the fix, so if you are on a newer build you already have it and something else is going on. To check where you are:

1. Open Settings. Under Updates it reads You're running Booked Solid followed by your version number.
2. If that number is below 1.11.12, click Check for updates in the top bar. The update window opens and walks through its states in front of you.
3. When it says the new version is ready, click Restart & install. The app closes, updates, and reopens in a few seconds.
4. Look at your due list again. The junk rows are gone on the first sweep after the restart.

You do not need to rebuild, re-import, re-scan, or clean anything out first. The fix works in two places at once: those files stop producing action signals when they are read, and the due sweep now refuses that whole class of record outright. So even an index built before you updated cannot leak old junk into the list. Your leads, notes, and conversations are completely untouched by the change.

The two dead ends: hiding rows and running the tune-up

Almost everyone tries one of these first, and both are dead ends. Skip them.

• Hide for today on a bogus row is a briefing preference, not a change to any record. It takes the row off today's briefing and nothing more. It comes back tomorrow, and the day after, because the thing generating it never changed. On a workspace with dozens of stray rows you can spend a real half hour clicking and be exactly where you started in the morning.
• Tune up my Booking HQ (in Settings, under Faster, lighter answers) looks like the button for this, and it is not. It walks your leads only, and all it does is add one Lifecycle line to each lead.md that is missing one. It never looks at the files causing this noise, so it will report that it tuned up some leads and change nothing you are complaining about.

What was actually going wrong

Worth knowing, because it tells you which of your files were the culprits.

The app builds a searchable index of the markdown in your Booking HQ and gives every file a type: a lead, a conversation, a note, a brain section, a ledger entry, and so on. The main due surfaces were scoped correctly from the start. Your Inbox reads conversation records only, and the due sweep already skipped your reference material on purpose, so brain/, the ledger, and your business context were never mined for work.

The leak was the catch-all. Any other markdown file that is not a recognised type gets filed under a generic kind called document, so that nothing you put in the folder is ever silently unfindable. That covers root-level docs, anything under _config/, files carried over from an older setup, and a version-history note. And document was not on the skip list. So the signal extractor happily mined those files for ordinary status vocabulary, words like awaiting, waiting and follow-up, and surfaced whatever sentence it found as an open item sitting alongside your real leads. On a workspace with a handful of those files, they crowd out everything that matters.

This was not hot-patched the same day on purpose. The test that decides what counts as reference material also governs how freshness is recalculated and how search results are ranked, so widening it blindly could have hidden a genuinely real item, which is worse than showing noise. A separate, narrower rule was written instead, with a repro test built from the kind of old planning doc a migrated workspace carries, and that is what shipped in 1.11.12.

Who this bit, and who never saw it

This bites migrated or hand-built workspaces, including anyone carrying files over from the older terminal-based way of working. It is quiet on a clean install, because the app does not create version-history files itself and a fresh Booking HQ has almost nothing in that catch-all. If you have never hand-copied notes or old planning docs into your Booking HQ folder, you almost certainly never saw this at all.

If you cannot update right now: rename stray .md notes to .txt

This takes about a minute, is completely safe, and is reversible. The indexer only ever reads .md, .csv and .json files, so a file renamed to .txt drops off the sweep immediately while staying just as readable to you.

1. Open Settings and find Your Booking HQ. The read-only box there shows the exact folder the app works in. Open that folder on your computer.
2. Look for markdown files you put there: loose notes at the top level of the folder, anything under _config/, an old planning doc, a version-history note carried over from a previous setup.
3. Rename each one from .md to .txt. Moving it out of the Booking HQ folder entirely works just as well.
4. Ask Otto for your follow-ups again. The noise is gone from that sweep on.

Do this only for loose notes you added yourself. Do not rename anything inside brain/, and do not touch files the app created for itself. If you are not sure who created a file, leave it alone and update the app instead.

How to tell a bogus row from a real one

A real due item ties back to a lead you recognise. On the Today screen every row in Due now carries a reason: was due with a date, due with a date, or gone quiet for everything else. The reason on its own will not settle it, because a bogus row wears gone quiet too. The reliable tell is the buttons on the row. A row the app can trace to one of your gigs offers Draft the follow-up and Open the record. A bogus row ties back to no lead at all, so it offers neither, and it quotes a generic status word out of context instead of naming a client.

One thing to clean up by hand on a Mac

If you had the Reminders sync switched on while this was happening, some junk may have escaped into your Mac. The sync creates reminders titled Follow up: plus the item name, in a list called Booked Solid, and it is deliberately create-only: it never deletes or edits anything, so your own reminders are never touched by it. That also means the junk it already created will not disappear on its own. Open the Reminders app, go to the Booked Solid list, and delete the ones that do not name a real client. Updating stops any new ones being created.

If it still does not work

If you are on 1.11.12 or newer, you have restarted, and the list is still full of rows you do not recognise, we want to see it. Email bookedsolid@kivimedia.freshdesk.com with two things: your version number from Settings under Updates, and two or three of the exact bogus rows copied as they appear. If you can also say roughly what is sitting loose in your Booking HQ folder, that is usually enough for us to pin it down without asking you for anything else.