Morning briefing
The morning briefing is the workflow that tells us where everything stands before we have asked. The decisions it leaves with us are the ones that matter: what to work on, and what to do about anything that is stuck. Everything else, reading the board, the inbox, the server and the money, a worker does every morning on its own. This page shows how we used to start the day, how it starts now, and the parts that make it work.
How we built ours
The briefing is written from the board, not from memory. If it happened, it's a row, and if it's a row, the briefing can see it.
How we used to do it
- Each morning we'd open the plan, the client list and the list of open work.
- Check what had changed in the code overnight and what was waiting for review.
- Read the inbox and the calendar.
- Look at the server and the money.
- Write ourselves a list, and decide what to work on.
The start of every day went on finding out where things stood.
What changed
We still read it, and we still decide what to work on. Gathering it, and noticing what needs us, stopped being ours.
How we do it now
- Every morning the worker starts on its own; no computer of ours needs to be on.
- It files the night's arrivals first: new files, new mail, new receipts.
- It reads the board, the latest server report and the money: what is owed and what has gone out.
- It writes the briefing as a row on the board and posts it to the team channel.
- Anything blocked, any failed charge and anything waiting on us goes to the alerts channel as well.
A short read, starting from what needs us.
The parts
The board that every other workflow writes to, which is what makes a briefing possible at all. A scheduled task in the cloud that runs the worker every morning. Two channels, one for the briefing and one for alerts. And one design choice that keeps it useful: the worker reads, files and reports, but takes no action on what it finds, so anything that needs a decision arrives as a "needs you" item for us.
What it took us
The routine existed first as something we ran by hand at the start of a session, then as a version on one of our own machines that emailed the briefing. In September it moved to a scheduled task in the cloud and began writing to the board and the team channel instead.