Main idea

A workspace is readily carved up by tempo. The frame of the mission moves little, the state of the work moves at every session, a source once received no longer moves, a draft gets rewritten, a validated decision stays. The reading is convenient and it stands up: it explains why the goal of a mission isn't rewritten every time attention shifts, and why the present state shouldn't be mixed in with the lasting rules.

It stops being enough, though, as soon as a fast-moving, unstable document starts to govern. A translation guide written in the middle of an English rereading is still moving — rules get added to it about reported speech, about untranslatable French realities, about the book's conceptual terms — and yet every rule validated in it binds all subsequent translations. Its frequency of change says nothing about its function.

So the so-called stable zone isn't the zone of what doesn't change: it is the zone of what durably governs. It isn't immobile, it is constitutional. It doesn't move at the pace of daily activity; it moves when the working contract changes.

Why it matters

The tempo criterion gets it wrong in both directions. It keeps out of the stable zone a rule that is recent but binding, and it lets in an old fact that has never governed anything, simply because nobody has touched it for six months. Switching to the function criterion makes the classification decidable at the moment of writing, without waiting to see how long the file goes unmodified.

It also changes what you watch: no longer a zone's last-modified date, but the list of what it makes binding.

Nuances and limits

The tempo reading keeps its usefulness where it was laid down: it protects against the most frequent misuse, which is writing the current state of the work in among the permanent rules.

And the function criterion says nothing about volume. A governing zone can swell until nobody reads it, and a rule nobody rereads goes on being applied without anyone remembering why it exists.

Open questions

• How do you spot that a rule of the frame has stopped governing, given that its immobility won't tell you?