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Briefing: What we decided about planning and tracking work

Briefing: What we decided about planning and tracking work

TL;DR

Over three meetings (9 to 13 October) the team worked out why our planning and tracking feels messy and agreed what to try. In a two to four week trial led by Uriel, Media House work lives in Asana and operations and planning in Beads and GitHub, with crossover work linked rather than copied. Everyone gets a weekly view of their own work from all three tools, once the task data is cleaned. We also set fixed weekly time for system work. As of 21 October the trial has not started.

What we need from you

  • Rufus and Uriel: check this matches what was decided by Friday 24 October, before it goes to the team. Asdra was due to draft this briefing, so please treat it as a starting point and change anything.
  • Everyone else: nothing yet. If something here would make your work harder, tell Uriel before the trial starts.

Why we did this

Tasks are spread across Asana, Beads and GitHub with no clear line between them, so people don't know where to look or log things. Many are duplicated, stale or missing an owner or priority, and it's hard to check what the AI says against a list you can see. Tracing this through (with the logical thinking process) points to four likely causes: no agreed rule for where things go, no owner for weekly planning, two teams in two tools, and building our systems while keeping everything else running.

What we agreed to try

The trial tests these changes together:

  • One home for each kind of work. Media House work (Uriel, Yo-Yo, Valerie) stays in Asana; operations and planning work (Rufus, Asdra, Fae) stays in Beads and GitHub. When something spans both, such as a paper release, one record owns it and the other links to it. For now, AI will not copy tasks into the other team's tool.
  • A weekly view for each person, with the planning sweep extended to read Asana. When the AI tells you about a task, it should link to the source record so you can check it (Claude once gave a due date that didn't exist in Asana).
  • Clean data first, since the weekly view is only as good as the tasks behind it. Asdra will run a regular clean-up routine outside Asana, with AI doing the repetitive checks and a person confirming.
  • A short task convention for all three tools: every task has an owner, a next action and a priority. The sweep will flag tasks that break it.

There will be a short Beads introduction; otherwise, rely on the weekly view.

What we decided

We will protect regular time for building the system, alongside weekly planning: the proposed slot is Thursday 12:00 to 14:00, owned by Rufus for now. Messy systems already cost us hours, so pushing back a deliverable now and then to protect this time is acceptable.

Rufus and Uriel own weekly planning, with Asdra learning the role as Uriel's deputy. Uriel coordinates incoming requests: Sylvie's requests for Life Itself or Seeds of Renaissance work are prioritised like any other team work. Rufus and Uriel will record each initiative's priority on its record, and initiative owners will rank their projects, so nobody has to read old weekly plans to know what matters now.

Every project will get a short record covering objective, decisions, open questions and status. Reference material goes in Markdown in our Git repositories, moved from Google Drive as each project is touched. Shared AI skills for project and weekly planning will follow, each with a short tutorial.

Where it stands (as of 21 October)

Nothing in the trial has started yet. The first steps are agreeing the exact Asana line, writing a rule for crossover work, cleaning the data and extending the sweep to Asana; owners are in the report below. Beads through Claude in the cloud, which decides whether Asdra, Fae and Sylvie can use it without a local setup, now reads tasks but can't yet save changes directly; a workaround is being tested.

Still open

  • The exact line between Asana and Beads/GitHub. Uriel's proposal is that public-facing and outside-collaborator work goes in Asana.
  • Whether operations and planning tasks go in Beads or GitHub Issues, and in which repository's Beads.
  • Whether Asdra and Fae keep copying requests from GitHub and Beads into Asana each week during the trial.
  • How priority and dates are expressed across tools: Asana uses high, medium and low labels with due dates, while Beads uses priority levels P0 to P4.
  • What Sylvie and Valerie need from a weekly summary (Fae and Asdra will work this out with them).
  • When the trial starts and ends.

A short "How we plan and track work" guide will follow the trial review.

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