The activity table

One line per activity: what it is, how long it takes, what comes before and after it, who owns it, what it serves, when it must be finished, and where it stands.

It is the third card, and the plainest object in the system: the plan written as rows. An activity is a bounded piece of work with a duration in days, at least one predecessor and one successor, an owner whose word it is, something above it that it serves, a finish-by inherited from a Milestone, and a status. Written both ways — before and after — the network reads in either direction by hand.

It is load-bearing because it is the only form in which a plan can be computed. Two passes over the rows, forward and then backward, yield every activity's Float; the rows with none are Critical Path. Nothing above it — the milestones, the season, The plan of the whole — can be checked for honesty without it, and nothing below it can be committed to reliably, because a Commitment needs a date that the logic supports rather than a date that was hoped for. An activity that serves nothing above it is busyness, and the table is where that shows.

A notebook holds it; thirty activities take an hour with a pencil; a free script computes the same two passes faster and changes nothing about the method. A supercell runs the same arithmetic over its own rows plus the published milestones of the Cells beneath it, so the table at a kitchen table and the table of a world are one object at two scales. Each week only constraint-free rows are released, which is where the table meets The look-ahead.

Also called: Card 3 Stands on: Pull planning · Predecessor / Successor · Work Breakdown Structure Opens onto: Critical Path · Float · The look-ahead · Commitment · Screens and paper In play: table · beyond Sources: The LIØNSBERG Operating System (book, draft v0) §4, Card 3 · Activity (wiki term page, drafts, unreviewed) · Float (same wave) · The DNA of Heaven, Part VII — lionsberg.wiki page name: Activity Open: none found.