The Daily Specials Board

Walk into any good restaurant before service and you'll find the same object: a board. Today's specials, what's running low, who's on which station. Nobody calls a meeting about it — the board is the meeting. Everyone reads it, everyone starts aligned, service begins.

You now run four stations — a butler, a sous-chef, a line cook, a meeting station — and each works beautifully when you remember to ask. That's the gap this lesson closes. Remembering is a chore too, and chores are what this course eats. Today your stations start reporting to a board, and the board cooks itself before you arrive.

What you'll plate today

board.html — a one-page morning briefing built from your kitchen's own files: what happened yesterday, what needs you today, what your stations did overnight. Scheduled, styled, waiting.

Ingredients

• Your prep-station kitchen, four stations deep
• The scheduling move from First Kitchen Lesson 8 (it's about to feel very familiar)
• About 30 minutes

Cook

1. Decide what a morning needs to say

Boards fail by saying too much. Order the interview first:

We're building my Daily Specials Board — a morning briefing page
cooked from this kitchen's own files: journal.md, CHORES.md,
butler-log.txt, meetings/, digest.md if fresh.

Interview me, five questions max: what do I actually want to know
at 8:55 on a workday? What's noise? What order? What should scream
vs whisper? Then write BOARD.md with the layout in plain words.

Answer like someone protecting their own attention — because that's the product here. A good board fits on one screen and answers exactly three questions: what happened, what needs me, what's stuck.

2. Cook the board

Build board.html from BOARD.md:

1. Pull from the kitchen's files only — journal (yesterday +
   today), CHORES.md scoreboard, butler-log (last run), meetings/
   (latest recap: unowned items scream), digest.md if today's.
2. Anything older than its useful life gets dimmed, not shown big
   — yesterday's digest is history, not news.
3. My First Kitchen taste rules apply. One screen, no scrolling
   on my laptop.
4. Open it and let me taste.

Taste and adjust with your Lesson-3-of-First-Kitchen loop — "the chores scoreboard should whisper, the ⚠ unowned items should be the loudest thing." You know how to do this part; notice that nobody had to tell you.

3. Schedule it — and feel the difference

Schedule the board to rebuild every weekday at 8:45, before I sit
down. Off switch first, then schedule. And add one line at the
bottom of the board: "cooked at [time] — if this time looks stale,
the kitchen didn't run."

That stale-time line is a professional's touch worth pausing on: an automation that fails silently is worse than no automation, because you trust a board that isn't updating. The timestamp is the board's own heartbeat — one glance tells you the kitchen ran. (Your butler's log taught the same lesson; this generalizes it: every scheduled thing needs a visible pulse.)

4. The first real morning

Tomorrow, coffee in hand, open board.html before anything else — before mail, before chat. Read it for thirty seconds. That's the new shape of a workday's first five minutes: not "let me wade in and find out what's on fire" but "I already know — let's start with the ⚠ items."

Save point "the specials board". Mark the chore done. And log:
first morning with a board.

When it burns

• The 8:45 run didn't happen — laptop asleep, the First Kitchen classic: "also rebuild at login if the morning run was missed." The stale-time line is what told you — it's already earning its keep.
• The board is beautiful but you don't look at it — a habit problem wearing a design costume. Make it the browser's start page, or have the schedule open it at 8:45, not just build it. Boards work by being in the way.
• It says too much by week two — boards accrete; chefs prune. "Cut the board back to BOARD.md — anything extra that's crept in goes." The spec file is the diet.
• You want it on your phone — you know this dish! It's Dinner Service Lesson 5. One honest caution before you ship it: this board is your work life on one page — the pre-flight privacy read matters more than ever, and Lesson 9 has opinions.
• Numbers on the board are wrong — boards don't lie, sources do: "which file did that number come from? Show me the line." Trace, fix the station, not the board.

Order up

□ BOARD.md says what a morning needs — and what it doesn't
□ board.html cooks from your kitchen's real files, one screen
□ Scheduled weekdays 8:45, off switch known, heartbeat visible
□ One real morning started with the board, not the inbox
□ CHORES.md: fifth DONE

Next up — Lesson 07: The Spreadsheet Station. The chore you scored highest back in Lesson 1 probably lives in a spreadsheet. Time to cook it — sums, cleanups, cross-checks, the monthly grind — by order.

Stuck on a step? Question box below.