Plan Clear Blockers

Clear Blockers

plan-sweep-blockers answers what is stuck and why. This one answers a different question, asked at a different moment:

The thing is available for an hour. What do I do with it?

Where the thing is whatever was scarce — a device nobody normally has, a staging environment, the one person who can approve, a window when the system can be taken down.

A board cannot answer that. It is organised by plan, and a plan is not a unit of anybody's afternoon. The four things worth doing while that resource is open usually live in four different plans, and nothing in planning/blocked/ puts them next to each other.

The instructions already exist. Do not write them again.

This is the design constraint, and getting it wrong produces something that looks more useful than it is.

The blocked plans already specify their own steps — that is what a plan is. Restating them here creates a second copy that drifts from the one that owns it, and the drift is silent: the plan gets revised, the agenda does not, and somebody follows the stale one.

Cite; never restate. The output points at the authoritative steps and adds only what is written nowhere else: the grouping, the order, and what each one buys.

The value is aggregation, prioritisation, dedup and ordering. Not a summary of the plans — a summary is what you get when you skip all four.

Step 1 — read both halves

planning/blocked/, for the blocked_on: field on each plan. And planning/reminders/, for the open ones. Neither is sufficient alone: the plan says what is stuck, the reminder says who or what can move it and when, and the batching only appears when both are on the table.

Include planning/in-progress/ too. A partially blocked plan stays in progress by design — see plan-sweep-blockers — and its gated step belongs in this agenda even though the plan is not in the blocked column.

Step 2 — group by blocker, never by category

Categories group for reading. Blockers group for doing.

A reminder's category and subject are right for browsing a directory and wrong here. Two reminders in one subject may need two different resources on two different days, and one in another subject may need the same resource as one of them.

Group by the thing that is briefly available:

<the scarce resource>, one sitting
  · <task>   → unblocks <plan-name>
  · <task>   → unblocks <plan-name>
  · <task>   → unblocks <plan-name>

That grouping is the output. Three blocked plans and one shared blocker is invisible from any single plan and obvious the moment they are stacked — and it converts three stalled tracks into one afternoon.

Step 3 — order inside the group

Ordering is judgement. These are the questions that decide it:

• What does the rest depend on? If one step is how the work reaches the resource at all, it goes first regardless of how interesting it is.
• What is cheapest to discover is impossible? A step that might reveal the resource cannot do the thing belongs early, while there is still time to react.
• Who has to be present, and for what? Check each reminder's audience. Work that needs only the operator can be done before the others arrive; work that needs somebody whose time is the scarce thing should not be spent on setup. Getting this wrong turns their hour into your preparation.
• What shares setup? Two steps needing the same environment open should be adjacent.

State the reason for the order in one line. An agenda whose sequence is unexplained gets reordered by whoever runs it — which is fine, but then it should be a list, not an order.

Step 4 — cite, and name the payoff

Each item carries three things and nothing else:

Cite by document name, the way plan-writing-syntax requires of every cross-reference: these documents move while the agenda is still on somebody's screen, and a path written this morning is wrong by the time it is used.

The third column is what makes an agenda persuasive rather than a chore list. "Take the measurement" is a task; "take the measurement → this plan stops being blocked" is a reason.

Step 5 — ask, but only when asking pays

Offer to go deeper on one group only when the list is long enough that reading it is work.

At half a dozen open reminders the whole agenda fits on a screen, and a clarifying question costs more than it saves — produce the agenda and let the reader choose. Past roughly fifteen, or across more than three or four distinct blockers, ask which group is live today and detail that one.

The question, when it is worth asking, is which resource you have — not which category you prefer. "Do you have the device, or an hour with the approver?" is answerable in a word and selects the group. "Which subject do you want detail on?" makes the reader do the grouping this skill exists to do for them.

Step 6 — the leftovers matter

Two things belong at the end of every agenda:

Blockers nobody can clear by acting. A plan waiting on another plan, or on a release that has not happened, is a dependency rather than a task — plan-sweep-blockers deliberately files no reminder for it. It is on nobody's afternoon. List these separately, with what would move them, so the reader knows they were considered rather than missed.

Decisions. A blocker waiting on an answer rather than a thing needs no resource except attention — so it can be cleared in a queue, in any order, anywhere. Reminders with category: decision are the shortest path to unsticking a board, because nothing has to be carried anywhere and nobody has to be anywhere.

What this skill does not do

• Change any plan or reminder. It reads and orders. Closing a reminder afterwards belongs to reminders-set; moving a plan out of blocked/ belongs to plan-workflow.
• Answer a decision. It surfaces the question and says what it is holding up.
• Find blockers. It reads what plan-sweep-blockers recorded. If the board is stale, sweep first — an agenda built on a stale board sends somebody to redo work that was finished last week.