Take the inventory and mark each row. Shipped means someone could use the artifact. Spin means you stopped without a finish, or you finished by doing the work over by hand.
Name the loops that ate the week.
Common spin: no written goal, switching apps mid-task, pasting the same blob five times, asking Copilot to “make it better” with no criterion.
Be specific. “Tuesday deck chat, six retries, still rebuilt slides by hand” is a finding. “I should use AI more” is not.
Core principles
- One shipped example and one spin example, both from last week.
- Name the cause in one phrase: unclear goal, wrong surface, context bloat, or retry-without-criteria.
- Teaching chats can be valuable. Count them as teach, not as failure — unless they never changed how you work.
- Share the readout with no one if you want. Honesty is for you.
Check yourself
What makes a spin finding useful?
You cannot pin a rule to a vibe. You can pin a rule to “no written done-when before I open a loop.”
Do this in Copilot
Write two short paragraphs: one shipped chat, one spin chat, each with a cause.
If Copilot moralizes, tell it to score the table only.
Score shipped vs spin
Here is my Copilot inventory table: [PASTE TABLE]. Mark each row shipped, teach, or spin. Then write: (1) usage shape in four sentences, (2) the clearest shipped example, (3) the clearest spin example with a likely cause (unclear goal / wrong surface / context bloat / retry without criteria). No shame. No generic productivity advice.
Did you run this in Copilot? Mark complete when you have tried it.
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