Revision 09 · Changed
Principle Five clarified: measure the size of the space, never what happens inside it
Was
Premature, difficult and illegible work needs somewhere to survive until it becomes recognisable, and that describes most of the work that ever mattered.
Now
Some work only proves its worth later. Disclose how much room people have for it, and never measure what they do inside it.
What changed
Protect the unmeasured space keeps its name and its place as the fifth principle. Its explanation is rewritten with examples from medicine, law, engineering and early careers, and it gains a mechanism: an organisation discloses how much protected time its people have, and nobody measures what happens inside it.
It also states where Principle Two stops: publish everything you measure, and choose deliberately not to measure everything.
Why
The old wording came from the creative industries, where Part I was written. Outside them, “premature, difficult and illegible work” read as a defence of art, and the principle was hard to apply in a hospital, a law firm or a bank.
Without a mechanism, the principle was an aspiration. Disclosing the size of the space makes it a condition in the sense of Principle One, something a stranger could verify, while what happens inside it stays out of reach.
Exploration pays off late and can’t be traced back to the hour that produced it, so every productivity metric scores it as zero, and AI makes it cheaper both to log everything and to skip the search for an unexpected answer. That makes it the first thing an efficiency programme removes.
Where it shows
The list
The ledger is a working spec, not a manifesto.
Get new principles, revisions and the arguments that killed them, roughly once a month and never more often.