Glossary.
The vocabulary we use, defined plainly. Where a term is ours rather than the field's, we say so.
Category
- Agentic performance intelligence
- A category of software that reads consented signals about a person's working pattern and proactively offers coaching, rather than only reporting a dashboard.
- AI performance coach
- Software that offers a person private, ongoing coaching on their working pattern, built from consented signals rather than a fixed programme or curriculum.
Signals
- Calendar load
- A measure of how demanding a person's schedule is, based on meeting density, back-to-back bookings and time actually left free, rather than headcount of meetings alone.
- Circadian rhythm
- The roughly 24-hour internal cycle that governs alertness, body temperature and sleep timing, and which shapes when a person naturally does their best thinking.
- Cognitive load
- The mental demand placed on a person by their current mix of tasks, meetings and interruptions, distinct from how many hours they have worked.
- Context switching
- The mental cost of moving between unrelated tasks or topics, which accumulates over a day and reduces the depth and quality of thinking available for any one of them.
- Deep work
- Extended, uninterrupted time spent on cognitively demanding tasks, generally requiring blocks of thirty minutes or more free from meetings and notifications.
- Heart rate variability (HRV)
- The variation in time between successive heartbeats, commonly used by wearables as a proxy for recovery and how well the body is coping with stress.
- Meeting fragmentation
- The extent to which a day's meetings are scattered in short, disconnected blocks rather than grouped together, leaving little usable time in between.
- Readiness
- A daily estimate of how prepared a person is to take on demanding work, based on overnight physiological recovery relative to their own baseline.
- Recovery score
- A composite daily score, produced by a wearable, that summarises how well rested and prepared a person's body appears to be for demanding activity.
- Resting heart rate
- The number of times the heart beats per minute at rest, typically measured overnight, where a rise above a person's normal range can indicate stress or incomplete recovery.
- Sleep debt
- The cumulative shortfall between the sleep a person has actually had and the amount their body appears to need, built up over several nights rather than one.
Method
- EWMA baseline
- An exponentially weighted moving average of a person's own trailing readings, used so that changes are judged against their individual normal rather than a population average.
- Personal baseline
- The rolling normal range for a specific individual across their signals, used as the point of comparison for deciding whether something has genuinely changed.
- Telemetry friction
- Sloane's metadata-only score of how fragmented and compressed a person's working day is, built from calendar and team-tool metadata such as meeting density, after-hours activity and message timing, never message content.
- Working capacity
- A person's current ability to take on demanding work, assessed against their own recent baseline rather than a fixed standard.
Privacy
- Differential privacy
- A mathematical approach to reporting aggregate patterns in a way that makes it statistically difficult to identify or infer information about any one individual.
- Metadata-only ingestion
- The practice of reading structural information about calendar events and messages, such as timing and participants, while never reading their actual content.
Operations
- Intervention ROI
- An estimate of the financial return from a specific coaching suggestion, based on outcomes such as reduced disruption, avoided absence or improved output.