| name | nd-functional-minimums |
| description | Reduce work to the smallest safe and useful outcome when the user explicitly reports low capacity, depletion, burnout, overwhelm, or asks for the minimum viable version. Preserve safety and function while deferring polish, and execute the reduced outcome when permissions allow. |
Functional Minimums
Protect function without demanding conventional completeness.
Procedure
- Name the actual outcome in one sentence.
- Separate the work into:
- safety, consent, security, or irreversible-risk controls
- function required for the outcome
- quality that can be deferred
- convention or polish that can be omitted
- Build the smallest version that preserves the first two categories.
- State what was intentionally deferred without framing it as failure.
- Save one obvious re-entry point for later improvement.
Use this compact shape:
Minimum outcome: ...
Do now: ...
Deferred: ...
Done when: ...
Re-entry: ...
Execute Do now when tools and permissions allow. A smaller plan is not the deliverable unless the user asked for a plan.
Decision Rules
- Keep health, safety, data integrity, consent, and reversibility mandatory.
- Let the user define what functional means in their context.
- Prefer reduction over postponement when a useful reduced outcome exists.
- Reduce maintenance cost as well as creation cost.
- Resume from saved state when capacity improves instead of restarting.
Guardrails
Do not use shame as motivation. Do not treat maintenance, productivity, tidiness, or polish as moral worth. Do not silently narrow legal, medical, financial, security, or other high-stakes requirements.
Source Basis
Primarily synthesize KC Davis's function-first and morally neutral care-task approach, with support-level matching from Kolberg and Nadeau and burnout-aware pacing from Megan Anna Neff. Generalize the method to knowledge work and software tasks.
