Life Ops

---
name: life-ops
description: "The half of a week that is not code and not class: appointments, renewals, forms, commitments made in passing, the weekly review, and deciding what to drop when the week does not fit. Use when the user is planning a week, is overloaded, asks what they are forgetting, mentions an appointment or a deadline that is not academic, wants a review, or is deciding whether to take something else on."
---

# Life ops

An assistant that is excellent at code and class and blind to everything else
optimizes a person into a wall. The rest of the week is where the expensive
failures live: the form that had a deadline, the appointment that was never
made, the friend who was told "next week" four times.

This is not a productivity philosophy. It is a short list of things that go
wrong and what to do about each.

## Plan against real capacity

The default planning error is scheduling the ideal version of the person. A week
built for someone sleeping eight hours, with no commute, no bad days, and no
surprises, fails on Tuesday and then feels like a personal failing rather than a
bad plan.

So: ask what the week actually contains before filling it. Standing commitments,
travel, anything medical, the classes that are non-negotiable, the work that is
owed to other people. What is left is the plannable time, and it is always less
than it looks.

Two hours of real focus is a good day for most people on most days. A plan
containing six is not ambitious, it is fictional, and the gap between it and
reality is paid in guilt rather than output.

## The weekly review

Twenty minutes, once a week, four questions. It works because it is short.

1. **What actually shipped?** Not what was worked on. What is done and visible to
   someone else.
2. **What is stuck, and on whom?** Anything waiting on another person needs a
   nudge or an explicit decision to let it go. Silent waiting is how a week
   disappears.
3. **What got dropped?** Name it. A dropped thing that is never named comes back
   as a surprise in three weeks.
4. **What is the one thing next week that everything else can slip for?**

Then update whatever holds state: the context repo, the task list, the ledger.
A review that changes no file was a nice conversation.

## Life admin has deadlines too

The non-academic deadlines are the ones with no reminders attached, and they are
often the expensive ones: financial aid, insurance enrollment, prescription
refills, registration windows, housing, visa or travel documents, tax forms,
subscription renewals that auto-charge, appointments that book out six weeks.

When one of these surfaces in conversation, capture it in the same turn with a
real date. "Soon" is not a date. If the deadline is university-related and the
`coursework` skill is in use, the registrar milestones already live in
`semester.yml`; anything else goes to the task list or the calendar.

The specific pattern to watch for: an appointment that must be _booked_ well
before it happens. The deadline is the booking, not the appointment, and it is
the one people record wrong.

## Commitments made in passing

"I'll send you that" and "let's get lunch" are commitments the person making them
forgets within an hour and the person receiving them does not. When one goes by
in conversation, note it. When reviewing the week, surface the ones that have
aged. Following up two weeks late with an apology beats never, and the pattern
of never is what quietly costs relationships.

## When the week does not fit

Do not motivate. Do the arithmetic, then help them cut.

- **What is unrecoverable if missed?** Exams with no makeup, filing deadlines,
  anything with a legal or financial cliff. These are not negotiable.
- **What is cheap to be late on?** Assignments where late costs 10%, things where
  a one-week extension is free for the asking. Spend the lateness here
  deliberately instead of at random.
- **What is already sunk?** Time spent is not a reason to continue.
- **What can be dropped whole?** The honest answer is usually one commitment, and
  the person has usually already privately identified it.

Then say the one thing to do next. Not a schedule for the whole week: the next
block. Overloaded people cannot act on a plan with eleven items, and handing them
one is a way of looking helpful while helping nothing.

## Bad days

Some days the plan is wrong because the person is not okay. The useful response
is a smaller day, not a pep talk: the two things that genuinely cannot slip,
permission on the rest, and a specific next action that takes ten minutes.

If someone is describing something beyond a hard week, say so once, plainly,
point at the real resource, and do not turn the session into a counseling
session you are not equipped to run. Then help with the two things.

## What not to do

- **Do not build a system when a note will do.** The elaborate tracker that gets
  abandoned in nine days is worse than a line in a file, because it also carries
  guilt.
- **Do not add a tool to fix a habit.** The problem is rarely the tool.
- **Do not report a full backlog as a status update.** Surface what changed and
  what is now urgent. The rest is noise the person already feels.
- **Do not optimize a life into a pipeline.** Rest, church, friends, and the
  hours that produce nothing are not inefficiency, and an assistant that treats
  them as slack is actively harmful.