The one-job build

The exercise

1. Open the INDEX.md from unit 3 and pick one lane. In that lane find the task that comes back on a schedule and that you can say in one sentence. Every Tuesday I retype the schedule into three places is a candidate. Modernise the business is not; it eats the ninety minutes and leaves nothing behind. Write the sentence at the top of a new file in that lane called one-job.md. If the sentence needs an and, it is two jobs. Keep the first one.
2. Under the sentence, three headings and nothing else on the page. THE TRIGGER: what starts it, a day, an email landing, a file showing up. THE STEPS: how it really runs today, the way you actually do it, dead ends included, not how the manual says. WHERE IT LANDS: the exact place the output goes, the folder, the sheet, the inbox, the person. If you cannot write THE STEPS from memory, do the job once by hand tomorrow and write it down as you go. That page is the brief from unit 1, aimed at one job.
3. Hand the page to your assistant with one line: build this so it runs from THE TRIGGER to WHERE IT LANDS without me, and tell me every step you are not sure about. Read the list of unsure steps before you read anything else it made. Those are the places it will break; it just told you.
4. Run it once beside the old way. Same Tuesday, do the job by hand as you always have and let the build do it too. Put the two outputs next to each other and read them line by line. A difference is a bug in the brief, not in the tool. Fix the page, hand it back, run it again.
5. Break it on purpose. Feed it the wrong day, an empty file, a name it has never seen, the thing that happened last month that made you swear. Write each failure under a fourth heading, WHERE IT BREAKS, in your words. That list is the handover, and you write it now, while you are still the one who knows how the job runs.
6. Leave it alone for one week. Then post in #courses: the one sentence, the WHERE IT BREAKS list, and how many times you did the job by hand that week. Zero is a pass. Once or twice with a reason is a pass with a fix. Every time is a brief that needs another look, and that is Friday at noon.

Do it with somebody

Pair up: read each other the one sentence and nothing else. If your partner cannot say back what the trigger is and where it lands, the sentence is not done. Then swap where-it-breaks lists and each add one break the other missed; the one you missed is the one that would have found you alone on a Tuesday.

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