They appear from the work
A person becomes a person in Zephyr the moment an extraction names them. You never sit down to enter anyone.
The relationship is the unit of work
Most coordination is not a task, it is a person. Zephyr keeps a running balance of every working relationship — what they owe you, what you owe them, and how long it has been quiet.
On screen
Ordered by who needs you, not alphabetically
A contacts list sorted A–Z tells you nothing. This one puts the person with something overdue between you at the top, then the person you have waited on longest, then the relationship that has gone quiet.
Every line is the same three facts: what they owe you, what you owe them, and when anything last moved. No pipeline stages, no deal values, no fields to keep tidy.
Not a CRM
Nobody has to maintain it
People appear because they were named in your work. There is no import step, no "add contact" chore, and nothing to keep up to date — the balance is derived from the actions you already have.
The balance sheet
Actions you are waiting on, attributed to them, are what they owe you. Your own open actions naming them are what you owe. Both directions, one line.
Quiet is a signal
After a fortnight with nothing moving, a relationship is flagged as gone quiet — the point at which "busy" starts reading as "forgotten".
The story so far
Open a person and you get the narrative: what has passed between you, in order, rather than a second copy of your task list filtered by name.
Before the meeting
Connect a calendar and the brief arrives before you talk, not after you ask: who is on the invite, and what is outstanding with each of them.
Ask about anyone
"What did I promise Sarah?" is a question the assistant answers from these records — or says it has nothing recorded, rather than guessing.
Why this shape
Because you get asked about people, not about tickets
Nobody stops you in a corridor to ask about ticket 4,417. They ask whether the referral went through, whether Maple Court came back, whether Sarah ever sent the rota. Those are questions about a relationship, and a list of tasks is the wrong index for them.
So the People tab is not a directory with work attached. It is the work, indexed by the person you will be asked about — which is the index your memory was using anyway.
- Overdue between you outranks volume. Someone with one late thing sits above someone with six that are all fine.
- Fourteen days is the quiet threshold. Operations users hold twenty to forty live relationships; two weeks of silence is where one starts slipping.
- Both directions are shown. A tool that only tracks what you owe makes you the only person who can be late.
- Nothing is inferred about the person. Zephyr records what your work says about a working relationship. It does not score, rank or profile anybody.
Ready to see it on your own work?
Zephyr is in development for iOS and Android. Join the early access list.