01
The late message
Someone on the West Coast sends a question at 22:00 your time. You see it. Now you can't unsee it. You reply because you feel responsible.
For everyone who goes offline
Log off like you mean it.
Your StandIn answers while you're off: in your words, with your name and a source on every answer. Accountable without being available. Actually enjoy your evening.
01 · What wears you down
The quiet pressure of distributed work
It doesn't announce itself. It builds slowly, until you're checking Slack at midnight "just in case."
02
Staying on just in case
You could close your laptop at 17:30. But there's a handoff happening somewhere else. You stay online until 20:00 waiting for a question that never comes.
03
Explaining the same thing every morning
Every morning begins the same way: describing what you did yesterday to the next shift. You've said the same thing about PR #482 five times this week.
04
Being the only one who knows
You hold context no one else has. This makes you feel important and trapped at the same time. Any question about your area requires you personally.
05
Interruptions that follow you home
You've left the office. Your phone hasn't. The boundary between work and offline has dissolved into a permanent state of mild availability.
06
On call without the pay
You're accountable 24 hours a day but you're only paid for eight. The implicit expectation is always-available, always-responsive.
02 · The flow
Your work already happened. Now it works for your team while you're offline.
Review three fields. Add a handoff note. Publish. Full coverage while you're gone.
Step 1
Review your brief.
Your brief starts pre-filled from today's work: PRs merged, tickets moved, things you captured during the day. Scan three fields: what you did, what's blocked, what's next. Add a handoff note if something needs context. Publish.
Connected integrations feed your draft automatically. The browser extension captures anything the tools miss. Nothing publishes without your approval.
Step 2
Close the laptop. Stay offline.
Silence your notifications. Your StandIn is on for your overnight hours, answering questions about your work from what you actually published, not from guesses. Teammates who would have pinged you get a cited answer instead.
A
Alex · Amsterdam
Is the Q3 report ready to go out?
SStanding in for Sarah
Yes, the final version is in the shared drive. Priya's numbers landed this morning, so it's good to send.
Source: Sarah's brief · yesterday 17:00 JST
Once you've left a clear brief, your team can keep working without you.
Step 3
Start your day knowing where things stand.
A single summary shows what your StandIn handled overnight, what moved forward in your absence, and what actually needs your attention today. You're not catching up on hours of Slack. You're reading a short list.
03 · Hard limits
What StandIn never does.
Availability-scoring tools got killed by engineering teams for one reason: they made people feel watched. StandIn was built knowing that history.
These are hard limits baked into the system, not promises in a policy document.
✕ Won't do
Your keystrokes are yours
StandIn does not count keystrokes, log active hours, record mouse movement, or know whether you're at your desk. None of that data exists in the system.
✕ Won't do
Your DMs are invisible
Your DMs are invisible. Your private channels are invisible. If you didn't publish it in a brief, it doesn't exist inside StandIn.
✕ Won't do
Your mood isn't data
StandIn cannot assess whether you're stressed, annoyed, or disengaged. It only answers from what you explicitly wrote.
✕ Won't do
Your briefs aren't your manager's scorecard
There is no leaderboard, no manager dashboard, no productivity score. Publishing a brief is a courtesy to your team, not a metric.
✓ Will do
Your brief is your statement. Not their evidence.
What you write in a brief is on the record: that's the point. But nothing else about your behavior, your patterns, or your activity is recorded. The written record protects you. The rest of your work is invisible.
These are system constraints, not promises. There is no admin toggle, no escalation path, no override. These capabilities simply don't exist in the product.
Read the security model →04 · What you get
What you actually get.
A real offline. Not an anxious one.
i
Permission to close the laptop
When your brief is published, you've done your job. You're not abandoning your team. You're handing off properly.
ii
Freedom from late pings
Your StandIn handles questions while you're off. Questions get answered. You don't get pinged.
iii
Protection from availability pressure
StandIn gives you a structural answer to "why weren't you online?": your brief was published. Context was available.
iv
Accountable without being available
Your work is visible through what you publish. You're responsible for your brief, not for being online.
v
Your decisions stay on the record
When you write an approved decision into a brief (a scope change, a deployment approval, a technical direction) it's timestamped and on the record. If someone reverses it later, the record exists. You're not defending a memory. You're pointing to what you wrote down.
05 · Your StandIn
Your Personal StandIn
Your StandIn is the published side of you. When a teammate asks what you did, where PR #482 stands, or whether you approved the schema change, your StandIn answers from your briefs, citing the exact line it read from.
Your StandIn only knows what you published. It can't read your DMs, infer your mood, or guess what you meant. When it answers, it cites your brief. When it can't answer, it says so. That honesty is what makes the rest of the answers trustworthy.
How StandIns work →Publish your brief. Log off like you mean it.
See how the brief-to-StandIn flow works in practice.