PACKET

Before routing any work, define its product, available inputs, operation, keep-safe constraints, edges, and test.

You hand your new assistant a task: "deal with the conference registrations." A week later you get back a spreadsheet in the wrong format, missing the payment reconciliation you assumed was obvious, with two attendees' dietary and medical details forwarded to a caterer who needed neither. Nothing about the assistant failed. The work was never actually defined.

PACKET is a six-question gate you run before routing any piece of work to anyone or anything. The letters: Product, what exact output must exist when this is done; Available inputs, what facts, artifacts, and permissions the worker gets; Cognitive operation, what actually happens (compute, judge, coordinate, act); Keep-safe constraints, what must not be exposed, distorted, automated, or made irreversible; Edges, what feeds this work, who consumes it, and where exceptions go; Test, the observable check proving it is complete. The cue to run it is any moment you are about to hand off, automate, or even schedule a vague task. Sixty seconds of answering the six questions turns "deal with registrations" into a bounded packet with a format, a data boundary, and a definition of done. When it works, the output arrives usable the first time. Skip the full gate only for trivial, low-stakes tasks where a wrong result costs less than the specification would.