Raw note — weekly planning, the tree, and a live portfolio table

Rufus's dictation, 26 Oct 2026, lightly tidied. Source for Weekly Portfolio Review (2620) and the tree guide draft (skeleton).

A live table rather than Markdown

In a live meeting I don't want to re-render from the Markdown page. We have the index and a script that refreshes it, but often I want to see a table of it in real time. It's like the portfolio page we've already built, which is static, but I want a version in real time that I can use to reprioritise: almost a mini Kanban. For now, even if I'm prompting you with the updates I want, the view should refresh in real time from a little web server rather than me having to write to Markdown and reload the page.

This may not be very relevant for now. The main thing is a good table overview, which we have in projects.md. Initiative should be in a separate column from project, even if it repeats, because what I'm really interested in is projects.

The key question is: have I got all my projects? If I haven't, why not? I need to work that out. After a sweep, when I look at the table, I want to know whether I have all my projects, and then set their priority, look at their phase, and so on.

The bigger purpose: weekly planning

This is part of the project-management planning work. Part of that is planning weekly: what is there, what is our backlog, what is its priority? The aim is to drill down for that.

A metaphor to develop, in its own mini guide for now rather than the main guide: it's hard to plan by looking at all the leaves on the tree. If you get all the leaves down it's overwhelming. If you look at just the trunk you know your overall mission, but that's not very helpful either: yes, we work on that one big thing. You want something intermediate. In our tree there are two or three levels: the trunk (what we're doing overall), initiatives (the first, big branches), projects coming off them, and finally the leaves. At a weekly planning we zoom in to the right level, probably around projects. Projects can have sub-projects and initiatives sub-initiatives, but that's a detail for now. Zoom to the project level and ask "what's our priority this week?" Once you've identified that, zoom down to the leaves: the tasks in that project.

So we want a survey or sweep skill to collect all the projects and their updates from their repos, because they're in different places. Then, centrally, a little prioritisation and moving things around on the board. At the end we push and save that. My increasing feeling is that overall prioritisation happens centrally, so those annotations need to be stored somewhere central, while most project data lives where the projects are.

The levels:

• the sweep
• previewing it
• giving feedback, maybe just by talking to an AI, about our prioritisation
• quickly seeing the updated result

The table is pretty good; it doesn't need a live view right now. This is perhaps a mini sub-project of the overall project-management system, and we should describe its purpose. Ultimately it leads to some data or document infrastructure, some skills that we run, and maybe some tooling, like the previewer or the board we manipulate at a given moment.