When each person starts work, Day Desk builds one prioritized FOIA plan and puts it directly into the Discord chat they already use.
01 · The problem
The team can be busy while important work still sits.
Nine kinds of work, all arriving at once, all looking equally urgent.
And every person has to go and find their own share of it before they can start — then decide alone which parts actually matter today.
02 · The change
Stop making the team search for their work.
The employee searches for work.
The work finds the employee.
03 · A normal morning
From starting work to one agreed Daily Plan.
04 · What it takes
Complexity happens behind the scenes. The employee gets clarity.
Today’s FOIA plan — Tuesday 25 August
8-hour workday · 8 tasks · proposed
Critical 1Production re-request — Case A 2Answer agency clarification — Case B Must handle 3Review records received — Case C 4Follow up, 41 days overdue — Case D 5Outstanding invoice — Case E Normal 6Follow up — Case F 7Submit request — Case G 8Review — Case HReply approve, or tell me what to change.
05 · Priority
Important work goes to the top. Easy work does not.
↓ Added straight into that person’s day, at whatever priority I give it
It works out what kind of work something is before deciding its order.
Weighed inside every band:
Data drives the default. Human judgment can change the priority.
System signals + human context → the day’s actual priority
Day Desk makes the routine calls on its own. But when Production needs a specific case, an outside deadline lands, or we want the team to try something, that context does not exist in Notion for the system to find — so it goes straight into the person’s day at the priority it deserves.
06 · The agreed plan
One list. Both sides. Agreed before the day starts.
The employee
Knows exactly what they are expected to handle — and had a say in it.
- Approve it as posted
- Reorder it around their own day
- Add something the system missed
- Say an item is already done
- Flag a blocker instead of going quiet
The manager
Knows exactly what that person is expected to handle, without asking anyone.
- What this person is handling today
- What was moved, added or dropped
- Which blockers they raised
- Where the day was already full
- No chasing across four systems to find out
Both
Are looking at the same agreed workload, from the start of the day.
- One shared version of the day
- Every change kept as a new version
- No reconstructing the day afterwards
- No arguing about what was expected
- The baseline everything else is measured against
07 · Through the day
The plan is only the start.
Plan → Work → Evidence → Progress → Next action.
Blocked work is recorded as blocked. A case waiting on an agency, a fee or a decision never looks the same as work that simply did not get done — so problems surface while there is still time to act on them, and legitimate blockers are never mistaken for poor performance.
08 · Verified movement
Day Desk measures case movement, not clicks.
Expectations are set per person — from their role, the hours they work, and the work actually available to them — not a flat quota across the team.
Less micromanagement. Better visibility.
09 · Pipeline impact
A lot of avoidable FOIA delay happens between one action and the next.
Where the waiting happens — and what Day Desk puts on someone’s list instead
10 · Implementation
Where we are now.
We are proving the system assigns the right work before we use the accountability layers.
Two people on purpose, so every mistake gets caught and corrected while it is cheap. We would rather show you real numbers from a working pilot later than estimates now. Automation is easy if we accept wrong answers — the work is making it right often enough to run the operation on.