The first ten minutes
You open the console at 9:14 on a Monday. The workspace home loads. You're not here to admire anything; you're here to make a small number of decisions and clear the path for the rest of the day. The screen is laid out so the answer to "what needs me right now?" is visible without scrolling.
At the top is workspace status. If something is degraded — a tracker connection that's stale, a repo that's behind on its template — there's a banner. Most mornings there's no banner. Below status sit three small panels: work in progress, recently shipped, signals from the engine. You glance, you confirm nothing is shouting, and you move on.
Drain the Inbox
The next stop is the Inbox. This is where the day's work actually lives. Three to five cards is a normal count, sorted by what blocks the most other work.
Read failures first — something tried to happen and stopped. Either you unblock it or you defer it with a one-line reason the team can read tomorrow. Read approvals next: signoffs you were expecting because someone asked or a step is gated on a human. Quick yes-or-no work that makes the difference between "the team is waiting on me" and "the team is moving."
Then clarifications. A clarification is a question baked into a piece of work — did you mean it this way, is this acceptable, should we ship this variant. Answering one clarification often cascades, clearing the next step queued behind it. Spend the most time here.
Improvements and exceptions come last. An improvement is a suggestion you can defer with a sentence about why. An exception is something that didn't fit the normal lane — give it an owner and move on. By the time the Inbox is empty enough, you've done the most important thing you'll do today.
Glance at what shipped
Below the Inbox the workspace home shows what merged in the last twenty-four hours. You're not reading commit messages — you're spot-checking the trail. Did each merged PR link back to a ticket? Does the ticket reflect what actually shipped? If something landed and nobody can explain why three months from now, that's the gap to close.
Glance at what's in progress
A short scan of in-flight work. Each active item should have three things: a tracker link, a repo and branch, and a named owner. If something has been "in progress" longer than it should be, it's probably waiting on a decision you can make in the Inbox in five minutes. Bring it forward.
Catch the knowledge that drifted
Did you answer the same question twice this week? Did somebody ask about something that should already have been written down? If the answer you gave was general enough to help the next person, it belongs in Knowledge. Open the catalog, pick the bucket where it fits, write a paragraph. The fix for a recurring question is one entry, not five repeats.
Close on quiet
A healthy morning looks like this: an Inbox you cleared, a few items in flight with owners, a couple of things that shipped overnight with clean trails, and a knowledge entry or two if a pattern repeated. Routines may have run and reported nothing eligible — that's valid, the work wasn't there. A system that quietly does nothing on a quiet day is doing exactly what you want.
If you sensed a gap — something that should have happened and didn't — the audit log is where you check. It records every action with who, what, and when. You probably won't open it most mornings. Knowing it's there for the morning you need it is the architecture working as intended.
That's the whole loop. Read, decide, write down what changed, close the laptop. The next part of these docs walks setup — connecting the workspace, the repo, and the tracker.