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 shared branch with three parts fixes both, and you can read it.
The weekly review that survives
The most valuable thirty minutes in any productivity method are the ones almost nobody still does by March. The fix is structural.
Zettelkasten, without the graveyard
Luhmann wrote seventy books from ninety thousand notes. Most people who copy his system build an archive nobody visits.
Waiting for, the list nobody keeps
The cheapest list in any productivity system is the one almost nobody maintains, and it is the one that makes you look organised to everybody else.
Two agents, one tree
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
A to-do list has no opinion about how long anything takes. That is why yours has eleven things on it for a day with four hours in it.
The twelve-week year, for one person
An annual goal has fifty-two weeks of tomorrow in it. Twelve weeks has 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. Five bullets take four minutes and prevent 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 and the fourth is the only one that changes anything.
The Checklist Manifesto, running in an outline
Experts do not fail from ignorance. Three rules from the operating room, running as a tree you can copy.
Someday / maybe, or how to say no without losing it
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
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, and the rule everyone skips
Kanban has two rules. Teams adopt the board and skip the second one, which is the one that does the work.
PARA, for when you cannot decide where a note goes
Filing by topic fails because most notes belong to three topics. Filing by how soon you will act on it has exactly one answer.
OKRs for one person
Most personal OKRs are a wish with three sub-wishes. The repair is a rule about numbers, and it is uncomfortable on purpose.
Meeting notes that leave the meeting
Nobody re-reads meeting notes. So write the four lines that need to leave the room, and let the rest be noise you never look at again.
Inbox zero is about the inbox, not the mail
Merlin Mann's phrase got attached to the wrong noun for twenty years, and the misreading is why people burn evenings not achieving it.
Habits, and the table that does not flatter you
Streak apps are designed to make you feel good. A five-column table is designed to show 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 admit no guessing.
Eisenhower, and the quadrant nobody visits
Three of the four boxes fill themselves. The fourth decides your year, 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.
Eight deploys from a sofa, phone only
Eight changes shipped and deployed while the person who ordered them was out of the house. He typed one line. Nobody re-read a transcript.