In Copilot, you may never see a token counter. You still spend: time, attention, and context windows stuffed with retries. The useful distinction is where that spend goes.
Teach, ship, or spin.
Teach: you learned something. Ship: a draft, deck, or decision left the chat. Spin: you kept going with no finish line — unclear goal, wrong app, or the same rewrite five times.
Measurement changes behavior. Once you can name your shape, you route better without a lecture.
Core principles
- Spin is spend with nothing shipped: thrash, redo, no written “done when.”
- A long thread is not automatically spin — a long thread that produced a sendable brief is shipped work.
- Defaulting every task to the heaviest Copilot experience is a routing problem, not a talent problem.
- You cannot fix what you will not look at. Last week’s chats are the dataset.
Check yourself
What is spin in this course?
Length is not the enemy. Unclear goals and redo loops are. A long chat that produced a sendable draft is shipped work.
Do this in Copilot
Write three labels you will use in this course: teach, ship, spin. Put one recent chat under each.
Paste honest descriptions. Titles plus what you actually sent or abandoned.
Sort three recent chats
I am auditing my Copilot use. Here are three recent chats, described briefly (goal, about how long, what I left with): [CHAT 1] [CHAT 2] [CHAT 3]. Sort each as teach, ship, or spin. Define those labels in one line each. If a chat is mixed, say which part shipped and which part spun. Do not moralize — just a clear readout.
Did you run this in Copilot? Mark complete when you have tried it.
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