A Week in Expert Kavanah

The weekly review: thirty minutes

Five things, in this order.

Bottlenecks first. Run the bottlenecks report. It names a place rather than a number, which means it produces an action.

Then the deal room by staleness, not by stage. What has gone quiet? That question produces follow-ups; 'how many in each stage' produces a number.

Then your own untouched assigned tasks — anything with no activity in two weeks. That set is what you have accepted and are not doing, and it needs a conversation rather than a nudge.

Then next week's calendar, looking for days where three or more deadlines cluster. Move one now.

And finally the triage queue, if capture is on. Clear it.

Thirty minutes, and every item on the list ends in a decision.

The monthly maintenance pass: fifteen minutes

This is the boring one that prevents the expensive failures.

Open the Integrations tab and look at every card's status. Reconnect anything unhealthy now rather than when someone notices. For sync-backed features, check the last successful sync rather than the status alone.

Check client health freshness. Any active account whose health has not been reviewed in a month is an account nobody has spoken to.

Check the credit balance and the burn trend. A step change traces to something someone armed.

And read the KVN ledger. Hits, overrides, most-cited lines. This is the only surface that tells you whether the charter is real.

The quarterly questions: an hour

Four questions, each about whether machinery is still earning its cost.

Every recurring run and every armed boardroom: what did the last one say, and did anyone act on it? Pause anything that fails this. Pausing is free.

Every automation rule: did it fire, and was the notification actionable? Delete anything that fails either.

Every persona: is it used, and does its scope still differ from the others? Delete the costumes.

Every API key and every saved browser login: is it still needed, and does it still belong to someone? Revoke the orphans.

This is the pass that stops a workspace accumulating configuration nobody remembers making. Almost everything you find will be something you set up once, enthusiastically, and never looked at again.

Which to skip

In a bad week, the honest priority order is: daily loop, then weekly review, then monthly maintenance, then quarterly.

Skipping the daily loop costs you the day. Skipping the weekly costs you drift you will notice. Skipping the monthly costs you a silent outage you will not notice for a fortnight. Skipping the quarterly costs you money and clutter, slowly.

So skip from the bottom. And if you find you have skipped the monthly pass three times running, delegate it rather than continuing to intend to do it — it is the one on this list that genuinely does not need to be you.