Prerequisites
It is known who may be interrupted, by what, and when: the priorities and workloads involved are settled before any notification is designed. That judgement is made before this sequence, and no pattern here makes it.
This sequence decides which events may interrupt the actor, when, and in what form. The events come from the other sequences: a document is published, a run finishes or fails, a limit is reached, a proposal arrives, a colleague makes an edit. Events that can wait until the actor comes back are covered by memory and continuity.
Setting the attention budget
Grade each kind of event by urgency — Status feedback
Take every kind of event the other sequences hand over, such as a publish, a hand-back, an unrequested proposal, or a background run finishing or failing, and give it one of a few fixed grades: the actor must act, must know now, or only needs to find it later. Grade each kind of event once, not each event. Keep the top grade rare, because it is the only one allowed to interrupt focused time.
Route each grade to a channel — Notification
Send each grade to one of three channels: interrupt the actor, announce without interrupting, or add silently to what is waiting. Below the top grade, let the notification say that something needs attention and let the actor decide when to look. Handle an event that needs a decision from the actor as the start of an exchange, not as a notification.
Protect focused time
Decide which protections exist, such as a focus block, working hours, or a quiet day, which ones are scheduled and which are switched on in the moment, and what each channel does with events that arrive meanwhile: hold them, collect them, or discard them.
Decide what may get through
For each protection, decide who and what may get through it, and how often. Use exceptions for named senders with a rate limit, such as once a day per sender, with a short window to try again for anything truly urgent.
Let the actor change every setting — Settings
The grades, channels, protections, and exceptions together make up the attention budget. Make all of it a default the actor can change per source, grade, and time of day. The actor's choice always wins: the system may lower a grade but never raise it back. Set the defaults as if nobody will ever open the settings, and treat a kind of event the actor keeps muting as wrongly graded.
Showing what is waiting
Applies when
Most events now arrive without interrupting. If the actor cannot see at a glance what is waiting, they will keep checking, and the checking costs more than the interruptions it replaced.
Give waiting events a place to be seen
Show waiting events in two places, in no set order: indicators on the screens the actor already uses, and a feed that collects the rest. When nothing has changed, both should say so clearly.
In any order:
Show status where the actor already looks — Status feedback, its indication shape
Grade indicators the same way as events: nothing, a dot, or a count. Reserve the count for messages addressed to the actor, so a number always means someone is waiting on them.
Collect non-interrupting events in a feed — Activity feed
Collect everything below the interrupting channel in one feed. Decide its order and what the actor subscribes to, and design it to be checked quickly and left, not read to the end.
Let the actor choose when to deal with things
Let the actor snooze a notification, ask to be reminded later, or schedule a message they send. Offer presets that point to the start of the next working block.
Timing each notification
Applies when
Events happen at moments nobody chose, often in the middle of work the budget knows nothing about. These steps are taken for each event, using the grades, channels, indicators, and feed already set up.
Choose when to deliver
Delay delivery by seconds or minutes, until the actor reaches a natural break in their task; anything that can wait for hours belongs in the feed. Move a notification to the interrupting channel only if the quiet one went unnoticed. Batch notifications only on a schedule the actor chose.
Summarise batches of events, and say so · optional
Where events arrive in large numbers, offer a summary as an opt-in feature. Mark it as a summary rather than the original, and link each point in it to the event it came from. Skip this step when events are few enough to show one at a time.
Show brief messages that dismiss themselves — Transient feedback
For events that only need to be noticed, show a short message that disappears on its own and never makes the actor stop. Decide how long it stays and whether it offers one action, usually undo. Anything important shown this way also goes to the feed.
Help the actor return to their work
At every grade, keep what the actor needs to resume: their place, their unsaved draft, and enough context that they do not have to work out again where they were. Do this for delayed notifications too.
Leaves: Each event arrives at a suitable moment, in a form that matches its grade, with any summary clearly marked, and with a way back to the work. Each notification also makes the actor a little more likely to switch notifications off.
Connections
Hands off to The encounter
At Setting the attention budget, step 2, via Opening (Agent)
an event that needs a decision rather than a look starts an exchange, and the budget's top grades decide when the agent may start one
Hands off to Working on the same thing
At Showing what is waiting, step 2
scheduled send and working hours decide when the actor's own message reaches a colleague, which is the same budget seen from the sender's side
Hands off to Memory and continuity
At Timing each notification, step 1
events kept out of the interrupting channels entirely wait for the catch-up when the actor returns
Calls Calibrating reliance
At Timing each notification, step 2, via Provenance marking
a generated summary is AI output, so it is marked as such and its points link back to the events they summarise
Hands off to Making changes
At Timing each notification, step 3, via Undo
the time before a brief message disappears is also the time to undo, and the undo it offers is built in that sequence
Hands off to Memory and continuity
At Timing each notification, step 4
when an interruption lasts beyond the session, that sequence restores the actor's place