Today's business post is about turning a list of deadlines into a system that reminds you. I wrote it because I have spent three months doing exactly that to my own work, so I thought I would count what is actually automated now, and be honest about the one thing that is not.
The deadlines that run without me
Every one of these fires on its own and leaves a line in a log I can open.
The daily publishing run. Two posts a day, one on each blog, at dawn. Since 29 August it has written a START line to a heartbeat file before it does anything else, so that a run that dies halfway looks different from one that never fired. The watchdog recommended that line on five separate days before I adopted it. There are 18 of those START lines in the file this morning, including today's.
The watchdog. Runs at 14:30 every day and reads the heartbeat for the last seven days, looking for a day with no line at all. It exists because on 25 July the daily run never fired and nothing errored, because nothing started. It has written 46 lines so far.
The inbox. Every two hours, reads, sorts, proposes a reply, never sends one. 596 lines in the same file.
The Sunday pair. An ad brief at 07:00 and next week's blog-link queue in the afternoon, both of which used to be a Sunday evening for me.
The quote-card queue. This is the one I am proudest of, because the automation is a rule about restraint. One quote card a day into a 15:00 slot, and never more than fourteen days ahead. When I measured it on 31 August the queue was 37 days long, because two cards a day had been going into a one-a-day slot for six weeks. This morning it is 33 posts across 24 days, the last one on 7 October, 22 days out. It shortens by one day per day and nothing scheduled gets deleted. It should reach the cap around 23 September.
The videos. 22 clips, one a day at 14:00, from yesterday until 5 October, every one confirmed scheduled by a read-back rather than trusted on a 201.
That last one is where the honest part starts.
The one I still do by hand
The videos were generated on 29 August. Thirty of them, with a posting calendar for September and an upload sheet, saved into a folder outside the engine. Nothing in the engine pointed at that folder. Not the month's calendar, not the rulebook, not a single run log. So the engine did what it was built to do: it ran every day, checked its own drafts folder for anything unshipped, found nothing, and logged that two videos were owed that week. Thirteen of the thirty days went by. On Sunday I asked why my videos had never been used, and the answer was that the system had never been told they existed.
That is the deadline I still do by hand. Not the filing, not the reminder, not the posting. The register. Something has to tell the system that a thing exists, and that something is me.
The fix took a morning: 22 of the 30 scheduled, the eight with a spoken line left out, links repaired, lockups stamped, all 44 posts read back and confirmed. The rule that came out of it is one line long: a content pack made anywhere gets registered in the calendar the day it is made, or it does not exist. Which is a rule about me, not about the engine.
What that means for the business post
The business post says a spreadsheet of deadlines is the list, not the system, and that the system starts when you store the rule instead of the date and let the date be derived. All of that is true and I stand behind it. But the rule has to be entered by a person, and the fact it derives from has to be entered by a person, and if either of those never happens, the most reliable reminder engine in the world reminds you of nothing, on time, every day.
I automated every deadline I could see. The one I could not automate was seeing.
What I am doing about it
The engine now reads a schedule file every morning and checks that today's two video posts are still where they should be, before it builds anything else. It cannot find a pack it has not been told about. It can, from now on, notice when one it has been told about goes missing. That is the boundary, and I would rather know exactly where it is than pretend it is not there.
Chat soon.