What's the current project I'm working on, and why?

I have spent almost a third of my life in a professional setting. The thing that keeps surfacing, year after year, is how much of the quality of the work comes down to communication. Early in a career it is maybe a tenth of the job. It only grows from there, and you start meeting the cases where communication that didn't land is the whole reason the work came out sub-par.

By year eight or nine I could feel the weight of the context I was carrying. Not the work — the context around it. Who decided what, which thread it was settled in, which doc has gone stale, what we tried last time and why it failed. I carried it so I could communicate effectively, and I watched people fail to carry it, continuously. When people fail at that, the system fails with them, however good the system is.

That is the job I saw forming underneath the actual job: carrier of context.

Where the current products stop

Slack and Teams should be where this gets solved. That is where the conversation already happens. But they carry the conversation — they don't help you have it. The transport is solved. The help is not.

What that help looks like

Two examples. Not the list — just the shape of the thing.

Hand over the context, not a pointer. Someone messages me: hey Adhyan, can you help me with this topic? That topic already exists in my context. The product should notice, and ask me one question — do you want to share your working context on this? If I say yes, they get it. Not a pointer to a person, a thread, or a doc they then have to piece together.

This holds at every level of an organisation, because work happens in collaboration. The exception is a zero-day org, where there is no context to hand over yet.

Write the update from everyone's context, not just mine. I need to post where a project stands. So I ask the product: phrase my context on X as a brief overview, where we are now, next steps, blockers. I never had to maintain that structure anywhere.

Drafting an update is not the new part — everything does that now. It turns new once the whole team is in it: what comes back is built from the context of the people working with me, not just my side of it. I don't have to ping five people to find out where they are. And nothing in it is out of date, because nobody had to remember to report.

The ideal version

A workplace where my communication is integrated deeply enough that I walk into a meeting and say brief us on this topic, and we start from there. A virtual teammate that brings up the right context at the moment it is needed.

This is the problem space I am exploring right now: how to help humans communicate better at work. None of it is settled — the rest gets worked out in the building, and you will read more of it here as I build.