Guides
Notes on how a small company runs, from the people building Opitor.
Free templates for this week
Download a worksheet, adapt it here, or copy it into the tools your team already uses.
- Weekly review checklist — open promises, blockers and next week's decisions.
- Message-to-task checklist — one owner, a deliverable and a clear due date.
- Weekly planning template — a repeatable rhythm from Monday to Friday.
A calendar of deadlines, not meetings: how a small company sees the month
Put due dates on a calendar instead of meetings, and three patterns appear that no single conversation will show you: the crowded week, the empty week, and the stacked person.
Deadlines that stay visible: how a small team stops dropping dates
Why a small team loses dates rather than tasks, and what it takes to keep a deadline where the people planning around it can actually see it.
Direct messages and groups: keeping internal communication readable
How internal communication in a small company stops being readable, what direct messages and groups are each good for, and the habit that keeps decisions findable.
Drafts, not sends: how signed AI writing keeps trust inside a team
When a name is on a message, a person should have stood behind the words. Here is the boundary that keeps that true, and why it makes teams braver, not more cautious.
Follow-ups that do not feel like nagging
Chasing is what follow-up turns into when it has no shape. The shape is one sentence, a specific commitment, a date, and a way out.
Turn chat messages into tasks: free tool and handoff checklist
A free tool and checklist for a 3–10 person team to turn agreed chat promises into tasks with owners, dates and a weekly follow-up list.
How a ten-person company runs on one system
The four things a small company has to get right every day, why they get lost between tools, and a daily and weekly rhythm that holds them.
AI memory: what to verify before you trust it
Before trusting AI memory, check how records are created and used, who can access them, and how deletion applies to stored data and backups.
Onboarding a new teammate into a running system
Most small-company onboarding is a pile of links and one sentence that does all the work. Here is a version that survives contact with a running system.
One AI chief of staff per person, not one for the company
Why the unit matters: whose context the AI holds, whose boundary it respects, and what only works when every person has their own.
Phone first: running your day from a phone browser
Half a founder's week happens standing up. The question is not whether work moves to the phone, but which parts of it should.
Quarterly goals for a ten-person company
Small companies rarely fail at writing quarterly goals. They fail at looking at them again. A version that survives a busy quarter at ten people.
Slack alternatives for small teams: what to try before switching
Concrete options for a small team losing commitments in chat, including when Slack Lists may solve the problem without a migration.
Starting alone: using a chief of staff before your company decides anything
A decision for ten people can take a quarter. Once one person has access, they can start alone and have something real to show before anyone has to agree.
Weekly planning template for a small team
A downloadable weekly rhythm for your team, with practical time slots, owners and a two-week review to adapt the routine.
Three languages, one company: English, Chinese and Thai in the same workspace
The interface is in three languages and follows each person's browser. That removes one kind of friction and leaves another kind to the team to handle.
Weekly review template for small teams: decisions and follow-ups
An editable weekly review worksheet that turns missed promises and blockers into decisions, named owners and follow-up dates.
What a chief of staff reads for you, and what it leaves alone
Reading is the whole basis of the help, which makes the edges of what it reads the first thing worth knowing. Here they are, plainly.
What an AI chief of staff never does
AI replies stay drafts, while Opitor's Memory controls and administrator access to private messages remain under production review.
When the founder is the bottleneck: handing follow-up to each person's chief of staff
The founder becomes the company's short-term memory, and then the company moves only as fast as one person can remember. Here is how to spread follow-up back out.
Who can see what: mapping access in a small company
A one-page access map should show what each role can read or change, how that was tested, and which answers still need verification.