Minutes are the one unit

One unit of work everywhere, so that estimates, records and cards can be added up without translation.

A body that measures its work in hours here, days there, story points somewhere else cannot add anything to anything. Every roll-up becomes a conversion, every conversion hides an assumption, and the assumptions are invisible by the time anyone looks at the total. So one unit is chosen and used everywhere: minutes.

Minutes are chosen because they are small enough to be honest. An estimate in days rounds away the difference between a task and an afternoon; an estimate in minutes forces the estimator to picture the actual work. They are also the unit a person already thinks in when asked how long something took, which keeps the record close to the lived thing rather than to a planning ritual.

The unit is not the measure of worth. What a body is actually after is throughput of the Goal, and minutes are only how the inputs are counted — the time, energy and attention a person gives, which is theirs, recorded on their own card, and which goes nowhere without their word. Counting minutes tells you what it cost. It does not tell you whether it was worth doing; the compass question does that.

Read with the rest of the conventions, the rule is simply that every surface is a sort of one deck: one model of the work, one unit, one truth, with the board, the hand and the queue as views of it rather than separate books.

Also called: one unit everywhere Stands on: TimeEnergy · The Record · Work Opens onto: The clock is read, never computed · Throughput · Value · The activity table · Float · Screens and paper In play: table · Room Sources: the seed text's conventions section as recorded in the concept field (SEED §12; Fable synthesis, unreviewed) · The LIØNSBERG Operating System, the activity table and the Record (draft) · lionsberg.wiki: The LIØNSBERG Operating System Open: the current seed text does not restate this convention; it survives from an earlier draft of that text. It should either be restored to the seed or retired. It is also silent on what a notebook-only Cell does, where minutes are more ceremony than help.