Read this when: a piece of work runs past one sitting and somebody has to see where it stands.
Some things finish in a reply. Others run for days: a document that goes through five versions, research that needs a decision from you halfway, a design waiting on your taste. Those get an object of their own, which holds what the work is, what is waiting on you, and what it has cost so far.
One object per piece of work, on Zanmai's own side rather than in your folders:
- what the work is, and what finished looks like
- who is on it and what state it is in
- where the material is, where the working files are, where the result will land
- what is waiting on you, and what you have already decided, each with its date
- a log of what each specialist changed
- what it has cost so far, in tokens and minutes
Everything else stays where it belongs. The object points at your material; it never holds a second copy of it.
The parts of one piece of work used to live in four places with four different lifetimes. What the work actually was lived in the conversation, and a conversation ends. The finished file went to the desk, the working files to a scratch folder, and the question waiting on you lived nowhere at all, so it disappeared when you closed the session.
You paid for that three ways: a specialist starting a new round had to be told the whole story again, a decision taken three weeks ago could not be named afterwards, and there was no number anywhere for what a piece of work had cost.
It is a plain file per piece of work plus a readable page, in zanmai/open/. You can open and read them in any editor, which is the point: what is waiting on you survives the session it came up in, and you can look at it on your own without asking.
Answering happens in the conversation, not in the file. Write into the page and Zanmai will not notice; say it, and the answer is recorded with its date and the work carries on from where it stopped.
- Not a second home for your material. Your notes stay in your own areas.
- Not a task list you are expected to maintain. The specialists keep it; you read it and decide.
- Not a plan file. What Zanmai proposes to do still comes to you in the conversation, before it does it.
Every folder ending in .base in your space is yours: nothing read, nothing written, left out of every scan, wherever you put it. Zanmai's own bookkeeping lives in its own folder instead, so the line runs by whose folder it is rather than by what kind of file it holds.
- A working session, start to close, what happens when you close with something unsettled
- Folder architecture, where everything lives
- Your editor, what an editor may and may not put in your space