You sit down, open the project, and look at the code. You know it was going well yesterday. You were close to something. But what, exactly, were you about to do?
Twenty minutes later you’ve re-read the last three commits and half a chat, and you’re still not sure.
This is part 2 of No Process. Part 1 laid out the minimum process. This part is about the smallest piece of it — and the one that saves the most time.
The costliest moment is the restart
Most work doesn’t get lost while you’re doing it. It gets lost in the gap between stopping and starting again. At the moment you stop, you know exactly what’s next. Ten hours later, that knowledge is gone.
The fix costs thirty seconds: before you stop, write the next step down.
What a good next step looks like
A next step is not a goal and not a to-do list. It’s one action you could start in five minutes:
| Vague (doesn’t help) | Concrete (does) |
|---|---|
| Work on listing | Write captions for the 3 screenshots |
| Fix bugs | Reproduce the crash when the bill is 0 |
| Chapter 7 | Draft section 2 of chapter 7 from the outline |
| Ads | Test the rewarded ad on a real device |
Three rules make it concrete:
- Start with a verb. Write, test, reproduce, draft, send.
- Name the thing. Which screenshots, which crash, which section.
- Small enough to start without thinking. If you’d need to plan first, the plan is the next step.
Keep it where the work is
A next step in a notebook or a separate app is one more thing to open. Keep it in the repo, in the same state file as the phase — the idea from phases, not to-do lists:
Phase: 5/6 — store listing
Next: write captions for the 3 screenshotsNow it’s the first thing you see — and the first thing the agent reads. It’s exactly the line you’d otherwise have to re-explain to the AI.
Let the agent write it, you check it
At the end of a session, ask: “Update the next step in the state file.” Agents are good at this — they know what they just finished. Your job is a five-second check: could you start that step tomorrow without thinking? If not, ask for something smaller.
One next step, not five
It’s tempting to write the next five steps. Don’t. A list turns back into a backlog, and a backlog doesn’t tell you where to start. One step. When it’s done, write the next one.
Where ShotMatic fits
ShotMatic shows the next step of every task right in its line on the board, next to its phase, across all your
repos. Your agent keeps it in progress.json; you see it the moment you open the app.
