The tools you need. For the way you work. Solving the time-wasting bits — whether you're a one-person team or running a multi-agent stack.
Start the diagnostic → or browse the disciplinesFor the owner-operator, the consultant, the senior IC inside a corporate stack. One person, AI augmentation already in the mix. The first edition.
Same five disciplines, retuned for a team of 2–12. Different artefacts dominate: handbooks, decision records, async covenants, shared knowledge graph.
The augmentation layer that cuts across Solo and Team. Persona stacks, MCP-native orchestration, agent-as-colleague discipline.
The fewest questions we could get away with while still assembling a playbook that's actually about your week. Includes the tools you already use, so we can tell you what to add and what to drop.
Pick up to three. Honest answers, not aspirational ones.
All five always running. None of them perfect. The playbook picks which discipline gets your attention this week and tells you why with a sourced claim, a 15-minute action, and a tool you can install before lunch.
The thinking layer above the software. Each style is a named tradition, with named advocates, that commits you to something specific. None is right for everyone. All are wrong for someone.
The discipline behind The Better Playbook: no round numbers without a citation, no "studies show" without the study, no anonymous expert wisdom. Where we couldn't find the primary source, we say so.
The Work Better category is over-narrativised and under-measured. Cal Newport, David Allen, Tiago Forte, Naval, Linear, Basecamp, GitLab, Automattic — all publish opinionated practice and almost no measured outcomes. The Atlassian Teamwork Lab study (2024) and the HBR / Wachovia Energy Project (2007) are nearly alone as named, dated, numerical claims at any depth.
The Better Playbook is built on the opposite discipline. Provenance over rhetoric. Action over framework. Voice over template. Every claim is named, dated, sourced. Every action is the size of a coffee break. Every chapter respects your time before it asks for it.
No "studies show". No "research suggests". Named operator, dated source, measurable claim — or the claim doesn't ship.
Every claim ends in a 15-minute action you can take today. Frameworks without actions are theatre.
Written by Will, gated by Belinda, no consultant-speak, no LinkedIn-shaped prose. The reward for completing a chapter is the voice of the next one.