Main idea

Two things accumulate in a workspace shared with an assistant, and nothing in their form tells them apart: what you teach it about the subject, and what you teach it about how to handle the subject. "When two people share the same surname in the building-management emails, use the meaning of the message to recover their first name and their company" states no fact about the building. It is a processing rule. "Each LinkedIn post defends a single idea, never a summary of the whole article" states nothing about the articles to be processed. It is a production constraint.

The border is the one between the ingredients and the recipe. A fact about the subject belongs to the sources or the notes, it can be checked, it can be dated, it can turn false. A directive isn't checked against the ground: it encodes a piece of method knowledge only the person giving the orders possesses — often because they have already seen the processing fail without it.

From this difference in nature follows a difference in handling. The directive belongs to the core reloaded at every session, it holds for all twenty-seven posts and for all five hundred emails, and a rule established in week 1 still applies in week 6 without being repeated. It is the only place in the setup that is cumulative in the strict sense: the further the mission advances, the more the assistant works like the person who laid the rule down.

Why it matters

This gives a test to apply to everything you write into a workspace: is this true of the subject, or true of the way I want it handled? The two answers send you to different files, and mixing them produces a rules file into which perishable facts slip — and therefore rules applied long after they stopped being right.

It also says where the expertise sits in assisted work. Not in the material, which is largely available: in the handful of processing rules you alone know, and that no quantity of sources will bring to the surface.

Nuances and limits

The distinction blurs as soon as the method depends on the ground. "Handle the managing agent's emails before the contractors'" is a working rule resting on a fact about the building; if the fact changes, the rule is wrong and nothing signals it, since it was filed on the side of what doesn't go stale.

And the cumulative character backfires. Directives piling up over weeks end up contradicting one another, and it is the assistant that arbitrates in silence, without anyone having decided.

Open questions

• On what occasion do you reread a directives file, given that it is reloaded at every session precisely so you no longer have to think about it?