Templates
The inbox your agent writes for you
The most useful thing an agent did for this product was hand its founder six checkboxes. Delegation runs both ways now.
Getting Things Done, in one outline
GTD does not die because people stop caring. It dies at capture and at the weekly review. A tree with checkboxes fixes both.
The branch you share with your agent
Most agent setups fail on permissions or on amnesia. One branch you can read fixes the amnesia, and a lock guards what the agent must not change.
The weekly review that survives past March
The most valuable thirty minutes in any productivity method are the ones almost nobody still does by March. The fix is structural.
The outbox your agent reads first
The report was one line in my own notes, written at midnight. By morning it was fixed, deployed, and ticked, with the evidence attached. No ticket was filed.
The loop, the goal, and the inbox
This product is built by an agent on a thirty-minute timer, gated by a live test suite, and steered through a checkbox list in my own outline. Here is the whole machine, and the two ways it broke on the day this was written.
Zettelkasten without the graveyard
Luhmann wrote seventy books from ninety thousand notes. Most people who copy his system build an archive nobody visits.
The Waiting For list nobody keeps
Almost nobody maintains the cheapest list in any productivity system, even though it is the list that makes you look organised to everybody else.
Two agents, one tree: memory shared, work not
The moment you run a second agent, the problem stops being memory and becomes agreement. That is a layout question.
Time-blocking against a list that lies
There is no place on a to-do list for how long anything takes. That is why yours has eleven things on it for a day with four hours in it.
The two-minute rule has a limit nobody quotes
Do it now if it takes two minutes. True, useful, and quietly responsible for some of the worst days you have had.
The twelve-week year for one person
An annual goal leaves fifty-two weeks to put things off. A twelve-week year leaves none, and that single change is the whole method.
The project brief that fits in five bullets
Most projects fail at the start, quietly, by never being defined. Writing five bullets takes four minutes and prevents the failure everybody blames on execution.
The post-mortem you will actually write
Four lines, written the week it ends. Three of them are history; the fourth is the one you will act on.
The Checklist Manifesto in an outline
Experts do not fail from ignorance. Three rules from the operating room, as a tree you can copy.
How to say no with a someday / maybe list
Most people cannot drop an idea because dropping it feels like deciding it was worthless. Parking it costs one line and settles the argument.
The reading notes nobody reads, and how to save them
Highlights are the most collected and least used notes in the world. The fix is one rule about which line is the parent.
Personal Kanban: the one rule everyone skips
Kanban has two rules, but many teams skip the important one. The board is the easy half; the limit on work in progress is the method.
Where does this note go? PARA has one answer
Filing by topic fails because most notes belong to three topics. Ask how soon you will act instead; that question has exactly one answer.
OKRs for one person: goals a solo can actually run
Most personal OKRs are a wish with three sub-wishes. The repair is a rule about numbers, and it is uncomfortable on purpose.
Take the decisions out of your meeting notes
Nobody re-reads meeting notes. Write four kinds of line instead, move three of them out to where they belong, and keep the rest as noise you never look at again.
Inbox zero is about the inbox, not the mail
Merlin Mann's phrase has been attached to the wrong noun for nineteen years, which is why people spend whole evenings deleting mail and still miss the point.
The habit table that shows the days you skipped
Streak apps are designed to make you feel good. A table with a column per day shows you the week you missed four days.
Give your agent a table, not a paragraph
An agent reading prose has to guess what the fields are. The same facts as a table cost fewer tokens and leave nothing to guess.
The Eisenhower quadrant nobody visits
Three of the four boxes fill up without any effort from you. The fourth is where your year is decided, and it is empty in almost every matrix ever drawn.
Eat the frog, but choose it the night before
Doing the hard thing first is good advice that fails at 08:45, because by then you are the person who has to pick it.