What do you do when waiting for prompts to come back?

A pad of scrap paper beside the keyboard has done more for my throughput than most of the tooling I changed this year. The minutes a model spends building are the minutes to spend deciding what happens after it lands.

- The next sequence - the two or three work orders after this one, written while this one runs.

- Notes on the output - what to keep and what to challenge, marked as you read rather than after.

- Designs - page layouts, folder trees, flows. Faster to draw than to describe.

The dead time in an agentic session is real. A job runs for a few minutes and there are three things you can do with that window: watch it, interrupt it, or think. Watching teaches you nothing and interrupting usually costs a rerun.

Writing by hand does something a second chat window does not. The keyboard pulls you back into the work; paper keeps you above it, which is the seat you are supposed to be in while an agent is running.

The reading half matters more than the planning half. Marking what to challenge as an output comes in, rather than reaching the end and reconstructing it, is the difference between a next instruction that corrects course and one that just says carry on.

The bit I have not solved is getting any of it back into the system. Everything on that pad is orientation the workspace never sees. One of the synced writing tablets pointed at a folder would close that - handwriting arriving as context on the next prompt, and the notes logged as part of the record of how a build actually went. If anyone here has wired one up, I want to hear how.

Genuinely think that is one of the more interesting unbuilt pieces sitting in plain sight...

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What do you do when waiting for prompts to come back?