Writing your own plan

This lesson asks you to write something

The nineteen lessons before this one gave you words and rules. This one is different. At the end of it you should be holding a page you wrote.

Get a sheet of paper or open an empty file. Pick one real piece of work. Not your whole job, and not a job you might have one day.

A plan for one task that you actually follow beats a plan for everything that you never open again. When it works, run the same questions over the next task.

You will see two finished pages here, and they look nothing like each other. That is on purpose. There is no correct shape, only the shape your own answers produce.

Seven questions

Answer these about your one piece of work. Short answers. Nobody is marking them.

One of the seven carries more weight than the rest. It is the second one, about what may leave your machine. Answer it as places rather than feelings, the way lesson eighteen asked. It feels private is not an answer. It may go to these two places and nowhere else is.

If your answer names somewhere as off limits, look for a tool that can hold that line instead of leaving it to your memory. Ollama, for one, has a local-only mode that turns its cloud features off, and its log will tell you they are off.

• What is the work, in one sentence?
• What is in the data, and which places is it allowed to go to?
• How hard is the thinking? Would a quick, plain answer do, or does this need real care?
• How often does it happen? Once a month, or fifty times a day?
• How fast must the answer come? Can it take five minutes, or must it be there while you wait?
• What do you do on the day the tool is not there?
• Who else needs the same thing?

Backed by Ollama FAQ.

Somebody else's answers

Nadia runs a two-person bookkeeping practice. Here are her seven answers, short and unclever, which is how they should be.

One warning before you read them. Nadia works in the UK, and the rule that pushes her records into software is a UK one. Your own country has its own rules, and they will not say the same thing. Look up yours rather than borrowing hers.

• The work: writing clear emails to clients about their accounts, and tidying my own messy notes.
• The data: client names and figures are in almost all of it. They already go to our accounting software, because UK tax rules require those records to be kept there. They go nowhere else.
• The thinking: not hard. Plain, correct, polite. A small model can do this.
• How often: most working days. Ten or fifteen times a week.
• How fast: while I wait. If it takes two minutes I will stop using it.
• If it is not there: I write the email myself, the way I did for eleven years.
• Who else: my one colleague, on her own laptop, with her own copy.

Backed by Making Tax Digital for Income Tax: the records that must go through software.

Nadia's one page

Those answers turn into seven lines. This is the whole artefact, and it is deliberately dull.

• Client names and figures may go to our accounting software. Nowhere else, and never into a chat tool.
• Local lane: a small model on the laptop drafts client emails and tidies notes. Most days.
• Cloud lane: reading long public guidance, and writing copy for our website. Twice a month.
• The rule: if a client name or number is in it, it stays on this laptop. If not, the cloud lane is allowed.
• If the internet goes: nothing important stops, because the client work was never in that lane.
• If the laptop goes: client work goes back to being done by hand until it is fixed. It does not get sent out.
• Review this page: first Monday in January.

A second set of answers

Priya is one of five people at a small charity. Her work is nothing like Nadia's, and her page comes out the other way up.

• The work: writing funding applications. Long, careful and persuasive.
• The data: the funder's guidance is published, and so are our accounts. The one thing that is not is the stories of the people we help.
• The thinking: hard. I tried a small model at home and got something bland that I rewrote from scratch.
• How often: four or five times a year.
• How fast: an afternoon is fine. There is always a deadline and it is never today.
• If it is not there: I write it myself, and I start a week earlier.
• Who else: four colleagues read and edit the same draft.

Priya's one page, and why it differs

Seven lines again, in the same dull format, landing somewhere else entirely.

Put the two pages side by side. Nadia's local lane does nearly all the work, and her cloud lane is a visitor. Priya's is the other way round. Neither of them got it wrong.

What decided it was not taste. Nadia's work is short, constant, and tied to a small list of allowed places. Priya's is long, rare, hard, and headed for publication anyway. Same seven questions, two different pages.

• May go to the cloud tool: funder guidance, our published accounts, our own draft text.
• May not: the name or story of anybody we help, unless we have written permission for that use.
• Cloud lane: drafting and reshaping applications. Four or five times a year, and it carries most of the work.
• Local lane: one job only. Taking the names out of a case study before it goes anywhere.
• If the cloud goes: I write it myself and start earlier. The deadline is the risk here, not the tool.
• If my laptop goes: almost nothing stops, because the work does not live on it.
• Review this page: after the next funding round.

What you are holding, and what you are not

You now have a plan for one piece of work, built from your own answers rather than someone else's advice.

That is the honest ceiling of this course. It is a novice to intermediate course and it has said so throughout. Twenty-five short lessons do not make anybody an expert, and they were never going to.

What they should have given you is three things. The words, so the subject stops being fog. The trade-offs, in both directions, so a sales page cannot move you. And a rule you can run again.

One more honest thing. A plan written today assumes a world that stays put, and it will not. Models get better, prices move, and rules get rewritten. That is why the last line of both pages is a review date, and why it is a date and not a feeling.

So run it again. When the work changes, and it will, the questions still work. That is more useful than a certificate.