Capture at the Transition

At every boundary between sessions, people, or places, record done, next, blocker, and risk in under a minute.

Monday morning, you open the project you left Friday afternoon and stare. There was a next step. It was obvious at the time, so obvious you did not write it down, and now it is gone, along with the reason you stopped where you did and the thing you were worried about. The first 40 minutes of your week will be spent re-deriving your own Friday.

Capture at the Transition is a heuristic for exactly this leak: context repeatedly lost at boundaries between sessions, people, or places. The procedure is deliberately tiny: at the boundary, spend under 60 seconds recording done, next, blocker, risk, and date. Friday-you writes three lines: finished the draft sections, next is the budget table, blocked on numbers from finance, risk that the deadline assumes their reply by Wednesday. Monday-you resumes in the time it takes to read them. The spec's stop rule makes the target concrete: you have captured enough when the next actor, including future you, can resume in under two minutes. Its safeguard guards the other flank: do not let this metastasize into continuous journaling that turns ordinary life into surveillance of itself. This is a boundary ritual, not a lifestyle. Sixty seconds at the seam, then move on.