Five questions your workspace has to answer — and nothing else.
Works in Notion, Google, or Microsoft, because it isn’t about the tool.
Nobody designs a bad workspace. It accumulates. A page here because there was a meeting, a folder there because a project started, a doc somebody made once and everyone kept linking to.
Then one day someone asks a simple question — what do we charge for that? — and there are three answers in three places, two of them wrong, and no way to tell which is which.
Every workspace has to answer five questions. Give each one a single home and the rest can be as messy as it likes.
Values. What you run from. What you'd never trade.
Changes rarely — a few times a year at most. If it's changing monthly, it isn't values, it's strategy.
Prices, offers, names, what's live, what you stopped doing. One owner. One date at the top.
The page almost nobody has, and the one that saves you most often. The rule that makes it work: if anything disagrees with this page, this page wins — and say so, because it means something else has gone stale.
One line each, dated, newest first. Append-only.
An index, not storage — the decision still gets filed wherever it belongs. This is how someone finds out a decision was made without knowing where it was filed. Without it, decisions get quietly remade.
The work, in priority order. Tasks, projects, today.
The only one that changes daily — which is exactly why it must not live in the same place as the things that shouldn't.
The routing rules. A fact goes here, a task there, an open question over there.
Short, and re-read more often than you'd think. Watch this one especially — a filing system that nobody re-reads rots exactly like everything else, and then the rules themselves are wrong.
This is the part that decides whether the five survive contact with a busy month.
Compass, How We File and Decisions are safe by nature. Values change rarely. Filing rules change rarely. Decisions are append-only — you add, you never maintain.
What’s True and What’s Next are different. They describe a world that moves, so they go stale the moment nobody touches them — and a stale What’s True is worse than none, because everything downstream inherits it confidently.
| What’s True | What’s Next | |
|---|---|---|
| On an event | Anything ships or changes → update it as part of shipping, not after. Nothing is “done” until this page reflects it. | Anything finishes → off. Anything gets decided → on. |
| On a clock | Weekly: re-verify and bump the date. Verified means somebody opened the thing and checked — not that somebody edited the page. | Daily: whoever prepares the day rewrites the order. |
| Before use | If the date is more than ~2 weeks old, say so before relying on it. | — |
Not find the page. Answer the question. If they have to ask someone, open three docs, or judge which of two pages is newer — the architecture isn't working yet, however tidy it looks.
A second one, once the first passes: pick a decision you made last month. Can you find where it's written down? If the answer is "it's in a message somewhere," you have four layers, not five.
The five are questions. They rebuild anywhere, unchanged:
| Notion | Microsoft | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Compass | A page | A Doc | A Word file / SharePoint page |
| What's True | A page, pinned | A Doc, pinned in Drive | A SharePoint page |
| Decisions | A page or database | A Doc, append at top | A List |
| What's Next | A database | A Sheet or Tasks | Planner / To Do |
| How We File | A page | A Doc | A page |
Five files in one folder is a legitimate implementation. If someone tells you this requires a particular tool, they're selling the tool.
A navigation page listing what exists, drifting away from what actually exists. Nobody updates the map when they add a page, and eventually the map is confidently wrong — which is worse than no map, because people trust it.
A page marked "⚠️ out of date" is not maintained — it's abandoned with a label. The label ages too, and eventually nobody knows which parts were the stale bit.
Either fix it, archive it, or say plainly what's still true in it. A warning is a decision deferred.
Create five things. Name them plainly. Put them where you'll see them. 1. COMPASS — who we are Our values, in our words. What we run from. What we won't trade. Owner: ______ Reviewed: yearly 2. WHAT'S TRUE — what's true right now Prices, offers, names, what's live, what we stopped doing. Owner: ______ Last verified: ______ <-- a DATE, always RULE: if anything disagrees with this page, this page wins — and say so. 3. DECISIONS — what we decided One line each, dated, newest first. Append-only, never rewritten. Anyone may add. Say where the decision was filed. 4. WHAT'S NEXT — what we're doing The work, in priority order. The only one that changes daily. 5. HOW WE FILE — where things go Fact -> What's True. Task -> the work. Open question -> the inbox. Done -> archive. Re-read this one quarterly; it rots too. EVERYTHING ELSE is a container or an archive. THE TEST: can a new person answer "what's true right now" in under ten seconds — without asking anyone?
Because you'll maintain five. Nobody maintains twelve, and a system nobody maintains becomes a system that lies — which is worse than having none, because you'll act on it.