Lay the overlays over your Map.
Map overlays aren’t a product you go install. They’re a way of looking at what you already do. A real map uses overlays — plastic sheets laid over the paper, each carrying one kind of information, all of it readable at once. The map underneath never changes. The overlays change what the ground means.
Take the work you repeat, the kind that eats your week, and lay the same five overlays over it: what gets generated, what gets researched, what gets produced, what gets distributed, what needs deciding. Then mark where a human has to be watching. That’s the entire idea. What you end up with is a composed set of capabilities laid over your Map, with judgment checkpoints built in at the points that still need you.
The kind that eats your week — not a one-time project. The event pipeline. The estimates. The follow-up. The reporting.
GENERATION
Drafts, writes, designs, brainstorms, and hands you ten ideas in the time it used to take to get one.
RESEARCH
Gathers, summarizes, monitors, checks. All of it is collection: pulling the numbers into one place, reading what you never had time to read, watching what you couldn't keep watching. The overlay does the collecting. The conclusions you draw from the pile are still yours.
PRODUCTION
Assembles the finished pieces: the pages, the events, the documents, the code — and the close-out that follows them.
DISTRIBUTION
Publishes, posts, schedules, delivers, follows up. The work reaches the people it was built for whether or not anyone is at a desk.
DECISION-SUPPORT
Watches the numbers, flags the anomalies, and frames your choices. Frames. Not makes. That one word is doing all the work in this sentence. What lands in front of you is one decision with the options gathered and laid side by side underneath it. The choosing stays yours.
Where does the work have to pass through you?
Checkpoints cut through all five overlays at the same time, on the same Map: defined points where the work has to pass through a named human — you — before it touches the world. Your Map already marks them: the calls with your name on the outcome.
Capability without checkpoints isn’t an advantage. It’s a system that sounds right and is wrong somewhere you haven’t found yet, moving at full speed with no one watching the road.
If you want a person
Book thirty minutes and bring your Map — a rough one is fine. Rough is how they all start.
From Running at the Speed of Light, Chapter Thirteen · Prometheus Press