Stax Digital Garden

TRC-1004 - Contextual Energy Horizons and Time Delta Scheduling

3 min read

Living Document Notice
Published 2026-09-17. The evolving architecture, revisions, and connected notes for this dispatch live in the Stax Digital Garden.

Contextual Energy Horizons and Time Delta Scheduling

Contextual Energy Horizons and Time Delta Scheduling: Dual-trace Phosphor P20 safety amber and P22R ruby red vector CRT macro showing stepped energy horizon levels and decaying time delta budget curves

Summary

Scheduling tasks based strictly on calendar deadlines guarantees burnout and failure when daily energy fluctuates. Trice structures execution around contextual energy horizons, cognitive load thresholds, and flexible time delta budgets.

The Tyranny of the Rigid Calendar

Assigning fixed calendar deadlines to creative or intellectual tasks creates artificial urgency and guilt. When an engineer allocates two hours on Tuesday morning for ‘Architecting Columnar Storage’, an unexpected production incident or poor sleep renders the task impossible to execute at that time, forcing demoralizing reschedule cascades.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology introduced the concept of selecting actions based on Context and Energy Available. Trice formalizes this into algorithmic query vectors.

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|                 Trice Energy Allocation Matrix              |
|                                                             |
|   High Focus / High Energy:                                 |
|   └── [TRC-1001: Columnar WAL Architecture (120m)]          |
|                                                             |
|   Low Focus / Medium Energy:                                |
|   └── [TRC-1005: Update Stdio RPC Test Harness (45m)]       |
|                                                             |
|   Low Focus / Low Energy (Exhaustion Buffer):               |
|   └── [TRC-1008: Prune Stale Git Branches (15m)]            |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

Energy Horizon Taxonomies

Every Trice task defines an energy_horizon and time_estimate_mins attribute:

energy_horizon: deep_focus   # deep_focus | routine | shallow | exhaustion
time_estimate_mins: 90
context:
  - "@terminal"
  - "@offline"
  • deep_focus: Requires uninterrupted focus, zero notifications, high working memory.
  • routine: Standard execution; test writing, documentation, code review.
  • shallow: Administrative overhead, sorting issues, updating manifests.
  • exhaustion: Mechanical tasks executed when mental reserves are depleted (tidying files, running backups).

Dynamic Execution Filtering

When the operator initiates a work block, they query Trice for tasks that fit their immediate physiological state rather than a rigid calendar:

# Query tasks suitable for a 45-minute low-energy window at an airport
bosun trice next \
  --energy shallow \
  --max-duration 45 \
  --context "@offline"

The Trice engine evaluates the database and returns matching candidates sorted by priority:

Candidates for Immediate Execution:
1. TRC-1042: Format JSON-RPC error dictionary (30m) [@offline, shallow]
2. TRC-1055: Audit markdown lint rules in Review/ (20m) [@offline, shallow]

This ensures that productivity aligns with biological capacity rather than fighting against it.

  • Directus Target: trice
  • Garden Source Reference: MOC - Bosun PKM Tools, MOC - Fleet Operations
  • Garden Source Reference: [TRC-1004 - Contextual Energy Horizons and Time Delta Scheduling](TRC-1004 - Contextual Energy Horizons and Time Delta Scheduling)

Graph View