The problem
In a large organisation you meet people through their titles. A title says where someone sits, but not what they are working on this month, what they are good at, or how they like to be approached.
So people guess. They message the most senior name they recognise, interrupt someone deep in focused work with a question another colleague could answer in a minute, or wait days for a reply from someone who prefers a conversation. Each of those costs both sides, and at the scale of hundreds of people it adds up to a large, invisible tax on attention.
Drucker put the responsibility on each person: colleagues cannot read your mind, so tell them how you work and what you are for. 37signals, from a different direction, built a company around calm, written, asynchronous communication, with regular written updates in place of status meetings. Both point to the same thing: a short, written account of each person, kept current by that person.
Options
We compared four ways of answering who is this, and how do I work with them?
| Approach | What it holds | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Directory profile | Name, title, team, photo | Says nothing about current work or how to reach someone well |
| “How to work with me” document | Pages of personal preferences | Too long to read, rarely updated, impossible to search |
| Chat status | What someone is doing right now | Gone in an hour; no context about what they own or know |
| Colleague card | Five short answers, a status and a dated heartbeat | Needs a small habit: one heartbeat line every week or two |
The card
Each card answers five questions, adapted from Drucker's own. Every answer is short enough to read in the time it takes to decide whether to send a message.
- What am I working on now, and until when? At most two things, each with an end date. Shape Up calls this the appetite: how much time the work is worth, fixed in advance.
- What can you count on me for? The contribution this person makes to others.
- How do I work best? Drucker asked whether a person is a reader or a listener. Some people take in a written note best; others need a conversation. The card says which, plus how quickly they usually reply.
- What do I need from you? What helps this person do good work.
- Ask me about, and ask someone else about. Topics where this person is the right one to ask, and topics where they would rather send you to someone better placed. That second list is the most useful line on the card: it stops experts becoming bottlenecks.
Status, without constant updates
Three states only: available, heads down until a date, and away until a date. Heads down doesn't mean unreachable; it means “please write, and I'll reply when I surface”. The dates expire on their own, so no one is left heads down forever.
A heartbeat
One or two sentences, written by the person, about what changed since last time. 37signals teams write heartbeats at the end of each cycle for the same reason: a short written summary does more than a meeting. A heartbeat older than three weeks is marked, which is the whole maintenance system.
Finding who to ask
The prototype starts with a question: what do you need help with? It ranks people by whether the topic is on their “ask me about” list, then by whether their current work touches it. If someone has asked to redirect that topic, their suggestion is shown in their place. People who are heads down still appear, but after those who are available, with the date they surface.
Limits
Cards are self-written and describe how people prefer to work. They are not performance records, availability tracking or a replacement for talking to each other. Data stays in this browser; sharing between people is a later step.