Dex's planning system is a set of nested loops: each day serves the week, each week serves the quarter, and everything traces back to your pillars — the standing areas of focus you named during setup. You don't have to use all the loops. The daily one alone is worth the price of admission; the others add leverage when you're ready.
Morning: /daily-plan
The anchor habit. Dex reads your calendar, your open tasks, your weekly priorities, and any commitments you've made, then proposes the day in three tiers:
- Must — the small number of things that genuinely have to happen today.
- Should — important, but survivable if they slip.
- Could — worth doing if the day opens up.
It's a proposal, not an order. Push back in plain English — "swap the deck review for the customer call prep" — and it re-plans. If you journal, Dex can open with a short reflection before the planning starts.
Behind the plan, a set of quiet background checks runs: is a deal going cold? Is a project stalling? Has something you flagged last week still not moved? These checks remember what they told you before and only escalate when a pattern repeats — so "third week in a row with no movement on Acme" surfaces, and one quiet week doesn't.
Evening: /daily-review
Five minutes to close the loop: what actually got done versus planned, follow-ups worth capturing, and tomorrow's likely focus. Two quietly valuable things happen here:
- Learnings get written down. Corrections you made, preferences you expressed, things that went sideways — captured into your vault so the system gets sharper.
- Career evidence gets caught in the moment. If you've enabled the Career room, wins worth remembering at review time are saved now, while the details are fresh — not reconstructed in a panic the night before your performance review.
Monday and Friday: the weekly loop
/week-plan sets your top three priorities for the week — three, deliberately, because a list of ten priorities is a list of none. Daily plans then bias toward serving them.
/week-review looks across the week: what moved, what stalled, themes and energy patterns, and open questions worth carrying into Monday. It's also when Dex consolidates the week's captured learnings into durable patterns.
Quarterly (optional): the strategic loop
If you enabled the Quarter Goals room, /quarter-plan sets three to five goals for the quarter and /quarter-review closes it out. Weekly priorities then link upward to quarterly goals, which sit under your pillars — a complete chain from "what am I doing at 10am" to "what am I building this year."
The full hierarchy, top to bottom:
| Level | Lives in | Set by |
|---|---|---|
| Pillars (ongoing focus areas) | System/pillars.yaml | Setup, revisable anytime |
| Quarter goals (3–5) | 01-Quarter_Goals/ | /quarter-plan |
| Week priorities (top 3) | 02-Week_Priorities/ | /week-plan |
| Daily plan (must/should/could) | archived daily | /daily-plan |
| Tasks | 03-Tasks/Tasks.md | Conversation, anytime |
The rhythm, as a loop rather than a list:
The compounding loop
-
01 Plan/daily-plan proposes the day from calendar, tasks, priorities
-
02 Workcapture as you go — meetings, decisions, promises land in the vault
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03 Review/daily-review closes the day and catches learnings
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04 Adaptpatterns feed back — tomorrow's plan knows what today taught it
A prompt for when the plan meets reality
Plans die by 11am sometimes. Don't abandon the system — replan inside it:
The morning got destroyed — [what happened]. Rebuild my afternoon from scratch. What still genuinely must happen today, what moves to tomorrow without real damage, and what was never going to happen anyway? Update the plan and flag anything where slipping means I owe someone a message.
Make it your own: the last clause is the one that saves relationships — slipped work is survivable, unannounced slipped work isn't.
Tidying: /triage
Not part of the daily rhythm, but the pressure valve for it. When quick captures pile up — loose notes in your inbox, scattered checkboxes across files — /triage routes each one to where it belongs, preferring whatever matches your current priorities, and tells you its reasoning with a confidence level. Run it whenever the inbox feels cluttered.
What a "Must" looks like in your world
How much rhythm is right?
Honest guidance rather than idealism:
- Minimum viable Dex:
/daily-planmost mornings. That's it. - The full daily loop (plan + review) is where the learning system kicks in — Dex starts adapting to you.
- The weekly loop is the highest-leverage five minutes in the system. If you skip everything else, keep Friday's
/week-review. - Quarterly matters most if your role involves strategic ownership — and you can switch it on months from now.
Don't just read this — paste it into your own Dex and it becomes a lesson about your actual work.
First, fetch and read the page I'm referring to: https://heydex.ai/help/daily-rhythm.md I just read the Dex Guide's page on the daily and weekly rhythm. Look at my last two weeks: which of the loops am I actually running, and which exist only in theory? Don't prescribe the ideal rhythm — design my MINIMUM one: the smallest set of habits that fits how I demonstrably work, anchored to moments I already reliably have. Then run today's step of it with me, right now.