Follow the note through
- Listen — your channels are read quietly, on your own computer.
- Sort — loose noise becomes tidy cards; the rest is filed without reaching you.
- Desk — the few real decisions arrive as prepared papers; you sign, send back with a note, or bin.
- Do — signed work is carried out by whichever AI service is best this month.
- Prove — every finished job leaves a receipt: what, when, and the proof.
Every channel comes in the same way
Texts, email, and notes all land in the same intake, the same way. That has a practical consequence: adding a new channel — a new messaging app, a new mailbox — never means rebuilding anything behind it. The pipeline reads whatever comes through the door and treats it identically.
It also means one privacy rule covers everything: whatever enters that door is read on your machines and stays on your machines.
Where the machine stops and you begin
The Desk is the only gate in the pipeline, and it's yours. Three house rules keep it honest:
Reversible work first
Before interrupting you, it does only work that can be undone: comparing, drafting, holding an option without spending. Interruption is the expensive thing; it's spent last.
Stop before authority
Anything that spends money, sends words in your name, or commits you to a time stops at the Desk and waits for your gesture. No exceptions, no "smart" overrides.
Precise papers only
A paper may not reach the Desk until it states the exact decision needed. If deciding takes more than a moment, the preparation failed — and it goes back.
Your record outlives any AI vendor
Everything the assistant knows — the cards, the history, the receipts — lives in your own records, one layer below whichever AI service happens to be doing the work: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever ships next. The AI is a replaceable engine bolted onto that record, never the owner of it. (When a signed job runs, that service receives the job's details — the request and what's needed to do it — never your records themselves.)
So when a better model ships next month (one always does), it swaps in and picks up exactly where the last one stood: same job, same history, nothing re-explained and nothing lost. Close a laptop mid-task, change vendors mid-year — the work and its paper trail survive untouched, because they were never stored inside the engine to begin with.
See the "do" stage above for the picture, or read why that's the trust argument →