By the time I could name what was wrong, I had spent most of a day with 35 open work sessions and no reliable way to tell which ones still mattered. That meant I could not tell which answer was current, which work had already been done, or what needed attention next.
It began in a way that will feel familiar to anyone who has ever let a kitchen counter fill up. I opened one work session, then another. Some were investigating a problem. Some were carrying out a task. Some were there because I wanted to check one small thing before I forgot. I treated them like browser tabs. If a window was still open, I assumed it might still be useful.
That worked for a while. It stopped working somewhere around five or six open sessions. At 35, it was not a way of working. It was a pile.
One session lasted seven hours and took 390 prompts, or back and forth messages, while it worked on a way to keep session information and written notes in sync. Another had been opened late at night to recover work after an earlier conversation lost its place. Three were unnamed one-prompt tests that produced nothing more than a quick confirmation. They were not bad sessions. They were just open windows that I kept counting as part of the job because I had no better record.
The first thing I tried was memory. I looked at the windows, remembered what I thought they were for, and assumed the ones I could see were the ones that mattered. It did not work. A session from the morning could hold one answer about a setting, while a session from the afternoon had gone another direction. Without a clear handoff, I could not tell which answer should win.
That cost time. During one stretch that morning, four separate sessions worked on the same setup problem. The last one took 98 prompts, longer than the first three put together, without a record of what the earlier work had already settled. Nothing malfunctioned. I was simply paying for the same thinking more than once, and losing the patience that comes from knowing where things stand.
The sharpest moment came at 10:20 in the morning. I opened a session with a two-sentence request containing three typos. The idea had arrived faster than I could type it: I needed a dashboard. I needed the written notes to match reality. I needed to know what was open and what each open session was actually doing.
That first attempt did not solve the problem either. It took 41 prompts and 26 minutes just to put the questions into words. But it gave me the list I had been missing. For every open session, I needed to know: Is it active? What job did it claim? Where is it working? When did it last do anything real?
The answer was a SessionStart hook, a small command that runs whenever a new work session opens. Its job was not to make decisions or to understand the work. It created a short record for each session with a start time, the device it came from, the folder it was working in, and the particular version of the project it had claimed. As work continued, that record could be updated with a plain label, a status such as active or idle, and the time of its last real activity.
Those records feed a simple dashboard. Instead of treating open windows as the truth, I could see current sessions grouped by project, their status, and when they had last been active. A session opened from a phone could be told apart from one opened at a desk. A three-minute test could be seen for what it was. The dashboard did not make the test sessions more valuable. It made them visible enough to close.
There is now a regular check on the records as well. It points out sessions that still say active after hours of no activity, work that claims one project while the written record says another, and gaps that do not fit the job a session said it was doing. The check does not replace attention. It saves attention for the moments when a person actually needs to decide something.
Some of that day cannot be repaired. The seven-hour session that helped build this system was itself one of the sessions I was trying to understand. Its earlier hours were not recorded in the new way. I can only piece them together from old conversation exports and change history. There is no going back and adding a record at the moment work began.
That is the part I keep coming back to. A tool can help keep the list, but it cannot decide what deserves my time. I still have to choose whether an old session is worth reopening, whether a task has changed, and whether it is time to stop.
The hook itself does not know which of the 35 sessions deserved to stay open; it only knows when each one started, where, and under what claimed project, which is exactly the gap that let one setup problem burn 98 prompts on its fourth pass instead of its first. That is still worth having: a record that says a session has been idle since 9am is a smaller thing to check than a screen of 35 windows, and small things get checked.