Notes on operational work
Writing about coordination work, the design of assistants that propose rather than act, and what we're learning while building Zephyr. No launch announcements you didn't ask for.
How do you test an assistant that must not invent work?
A hundred labelled fixtures, four fixed targets, and one uncomfortable discovery: for months our perfect scores were measuring the wrong engine.
How to share one thing without giving away everything
The person you need one answer from should not have to join your tool. What it takes to make a shared link safe enough to send.
The relationship is the unit of work
Nobody asks you about ticket 4,417. They ask whether Sarah ever sent the rota. Why the useful index for coordination work is the person.
Your inbox is not a task list
Most commitments arrive by mail and stay there. Four structural reasons a mailbox loses them — and what it takes to read one without reading all of it.
The work that never gets scheduled
Every coordination job contains a second job that nobody planned, nobody measures, and everybody is quietly failing at.
The case for making the AI ask first
Every assistant product is being pushed toward autonomy. In operations work, that's the wrong direction, and the reason is asymmetry.
Waiting is half the job, and no tool tracks it
Task lists model work you will do. They have no representation for work you have asked someone else to do — which is most of coordination.
250 words, or it's a second inbox
A daily summary that takes five minutes to read is another thing to get behind on. The word limit is not a constraint on the feature — it is the feature.
Capture first, organise later — and let something else do the organising
The classic productivity advice is right about capture and wrong about who should do the processing.
An assistant that can say “I don’t have that recorded”
The hardest thing to build into a work assistant isn't knowledge. It's the discipline to return nothing.
Reading this because something keeps slipping?
That's the entire problem Zephyr is built for.