A working day with Connect
Most days are one pass through Needs You, a glance at what went out unsupervised, and nothing else. The work is not supervision — it is the handful of decisions Connect deliberately did not take, plus writing down any correction you found yourself making twice. Everything beyond that belongs to the weekly review rather than the daily one.
The morning pass#
- Open Needs You and work it top down until it is empty or until the remaining items belong to somebody else.
- Scan the activity view for what went out without you overnight — not to check every message, but to notice anything you would not have said.
- Look at what is due today on the follow-ups screen, particularly anything on the
taskchannel, because nothing else does those.
That is the whole obligation on an ordinary day, and it is meant to shrink over time. A routine that grows heavier week by week is a signal about your autonomy settings rather than about your workload.
The one habit worth forming#
Write down a correction the second time you make it, not the fifth. Editing a draft changes one message and teaches nothing durable; the same edit as a standing instruction changes every future draft on that channel. This single habit is the difference between Connect improving over a month and staying exactly as good as it was on day one.
- Twice in a week
- Write it down — a rule for tone, Knowledge for a fact, memory for one person.
- Once, oddly
- Let it go. A one-off correction is not a pattern, and rules written from single cases contradict each other later.
- Every message, everywhere
- Something structural is wrong — the wrong mailbox role, missing Knowledge, or a channel that should not be autonomous yet.
What not to do daily#
- Do not read every sent message. If a channel is autonomous and you still read everything, the setting is wrong, not the volume.
- Do not re-tune the voice after one bad call. Voice changes are worth batching and reviewing properly rather than reacting to a single caller.
- Do not clear the queue by rejecting. A rejection stops one draft; a pile of them on the same subject means the underlying rule needs changing.
- Do not audit the decision log for pleasure. It is a tool for answering a specific question — 'why did this happen' — and reading it without a question invites second-guessing decisions that were correct.
When the day is not ordinary#
Two situations change the routine. The first is a mistake that has already reached a customer: deal with the customer first, then find the decision in the log, then change the thing that produced it — in that order, because the third step is worthless if the first never happens.
The second is a period you cannot supervise — illness, travel, a shutdown. Rather than leaving the queue to grow, decide deliberately: tighten autonomy so less is attempted, hand the queue to a colleague, or stop Connect entirely with the runtime switch, which changes no settings and restores everything exactly as it was when you switch it back on. Set Connect up before you go away goes through the choice properly.
Questions#
How long should the daily pass take?
Long enough to make the decisions in the queue with attention, which for a settled workspace is minutes rather than hours. If it reliably takes longer, the useful lever is a narrower autonomy rule on the traffic that is routine, not a faster reading style.
Do I need to check that Connect is running?
The queue tells you. A mailbox that has stopped fetching, a line that is not ready and a spent allowance all raise themselves into Needs You, so there is no separate health round to do. What is worth noticing is a queue that is empty *and* a conversation list that has not moved.
What if I skip a day?
Held items wait rather than expiring, so nothing is lost — but they do go stale. A draft approved two days late answers the message before last, which is why the queue shows when a thread has moved on and why regenerating is often better than sending what was written.