Working as a Conductor

View infographicWhen agents do the execution, the bottleneck becomes your own attention. How fast you get into a context, and whether you spend it on the right things.

I used the conductor metaphor once already, for how files should be named. The orchestration file doesn't play an instrument. It reads the sheet music and tells the instruments when to play. That's my job now too. Four or five agents are playing at once, and what I control is where I look and what I decide.

Automation doesn't simply add to what you produce. It shifts it. You ship more, but you lose some of your ability to do the work without the tool.

That trade is fine if you know what you're keeping. Here's what I keep.

Medicine, the military and aviation make urgent, expensive decisions all day, and each of them already worked out how to hand information to the person who has to decide. You don't need to invent a format for your agents. Ask them to report in these.

Presentation matters too. Images and colour get read faster than plain text, so use them to point attention where it needs to go.

With a rotating stream of tasks, big blocks will pile up even if you stagger them. You can't schedule your way out of it. What matters is how you handle the pile.

Don't work the pile like a stack. How deep a task branches says nothing about how important it is.

The Notion note has to be good enough that picking the task up later is cheap. A sloppy note only moves the context instead of closing it. Without a trusted place to put things, your mind keeps a dropped branch warm out of fear of losing it.

Batching helps. Fifteen focused minutes that free up a slot beat three 5-minute half-visits. Re-entry is the expensive part, not the work.

Idle time is for keeping your mind free, not for filling it. The costly moment is when several handoffs land at once, and you want to meet it fresh.

Short-form feeds like TikTok and Instagram are pure cost. Cut them. They tire the mind and return nothing.

But "all input is cost" is a trap. Taste and judgment are your actual edge, and they grow from novels, side conversations and curiosity with no goal. Broad, undirected input is not the same thing as a feed.

Protect room for it, or you become a fast conductor with a shrinking repertoire.