Contexts and energy

Two small enumerations show up across many commands. Both are fixed vocabularies (not free text), so they stay consistent and filterable.

Contexts — the life domain

A context classifies which part of life a project, stewardship, or commitment belongs to. The set is fixed:

You set a context when you create a project (--context), stewardship (--context), or commitment (--context). It groups and colours items in views and lets the system reason about balance across your life, not just your work.

Contexts are a compile-time set, not configurable — keeping the vocabulary small and shared is the point. (Stewardships accept the same set.)

Energy — the effort a thing needs

An energy level tags how much focus an action demands, so the morning suggestion can match the work to how you actually feel:

You tag an action with --energy when you add it. Then:

# "I have a clear morning" — bias the suggestion toward deep work:
cdno orient --energy deep

# "I'm fried" — surface something light instead:
cdno orient --energy light

cdno orient uses the energy bias to pick which next action to suggest as your starting point. Matching the task to your state — rather than forcing the hardest thing first — is part of what makes the daily loop sustainable.

Focus

Energy says what kind of work to pick; focus says what you are on right now. It is a single slot, and it is deliberate at both ends: you put something in it, and you take it out.

cdno now reads it back. Nothing is stored beside the daily log: the focus is replayed from it each time, so there is nothing to keep in sync and a line you write by hand counts as long as it has the writers’ shape.

One slot. Starting something while something else is in focus is refused, naming the way forward (switch, or pause first). You can always move on; you just say so, which makes the move a line in the log instead of a silent change of subject. The same holds on reading: a newer start displaces an older one for good, and finishing the newer one does not bring the older back.

The window. A start left open at midnight is still the focus in the morning, with its day named, and expires after that. The window is carry_over_days, default 1; set it to 0 to read today only. resume re-anchors a carried focus to today, so work you keep going on does not expire, and work you stop lets it lapse.

Pause and resume. pause is the honest way to stop without finishing: the action stays open on the map, and an optional --next records where to pick up. Pauses are remembered for paused_lookback_days, default 14, which covers a weekend. A paused action stops being offered once something later started, resumed, finished, dropped or promoted it. Promoting a bullet while it is in focus is fine: the focus follows it to the new note.

With an assistant. Over MCP the focus rides along on the reads and on the results of eighteen write tools, so an agent knows what you are on without asking. The server never refuses a write for being outside the focus. The agent’s job is to notice a change of subject and say it in one sentence, offering to capture the thought and stay, to do it now as an aside, or to move over if you say so, and to give you a cue to get back (next: is what it reads out). It raises a given topic at most once per focus, never asks you why, and never pauses or resumes without your yes.

The during: tag. While a focus is open, a log line written by cdno log, an inbox capture, and a ## Notes entry (on its noted pointer line in ## Logs) are tagged with its project: during: [[surrogate-model]] under the log line, captured_during: surrogate-model in an inbox item. The tag is what lets a later review see where captures came from, and it survives triage because the discard line copies it.

Next: Configuration.