# The Chief-of-Staff Playbook

> Build the chief of staff. Don’t hire one. Email triage, transcript handling, brain capture, daily research.

*OP1 · Module M7 — How I Run My Day · The CEO AI Playbook by Stephen Forte*

Canonical: https://academy.buildclub.com/m7/op1-chief-of-staff

## Thesis

Build the chief of staff. Don't hire one.

## Key Takeaways

- Build the chief of staff. Don't hire one.
- 200 — emails a day across personal and BuildClub inboxes (BuildClub — the AI operating system Stephen Forte runs his firm on).
- 170 wpm — dictation speed I sustain with Spokenly — faster than typing or talking.
- ~10 — meetings a week, each one a transcript that becomes a working doc.
- Pick one inbox. Build a morning-brief agent against it this week. Approval, not autonomy.

## The Playbook

1. **Notion is the human-facing surface** — Every project, every client, every meeting has a Notion page. Humans read here. Agents write here.
2. **Google Drive is the human knowledge layer** — Documents I share with my team, clients, and collaborators. Where human knowledge lives, gets reviewed, and gets handed off. The everyday read-write surface for the people on my team.
3. **GitHub is the agent surface** — Prompts, scripts, configs, audit logs. Versioned. Diffable. Reviewable. Agents read and write here.
4. **S3 is agentic storage** — The materials and knowledge my agents need to do their work — raw transcripts, raw analyses, structured corpora, model artifacts. Not the docs I read day to day; the corpus the agents read.
5. **Zep + Mem0 sit on top** — The brain that lets agents reason across Notion, Drive, GitHub, and S3 without re-reading everything every time — and the portable session memory that follows me across AI tools.

## Key Numbers

- **200** — emails a day across personal and BuildClub inboxes (BuildClub — the AI operating system Stephen Forte runs his firm on). (Personal volume)
- **170 wpm** — dictation speed I sustain with Spokenly — faster than typing or talking. (Spokenly)
- **~10** — meetings a week, each one a transcript that becomes a working doc. (Fireflies + Zep + Notion stack)

## What to Do Monday

- Pick one inbox. Build a morning-brief agent against it this week. Approval, not autonomy.
- Turn on automatic meeting transcription for every call. No exceptions.
- Choose one memory layer (Zep, Mem0, or a Notion DB). Feed transcripts and decisions into it.
- Install dictation everywhere. Stop typing prompts. Brief the model the way you brief a human.
- Name the four file surfaces in your org: human-facing, agent-facing, cold store, brain. Anything that doesn't fit one of those four moves.

## FAQ

**What is the core idea of The Chief-of-Staff Playbook?**

Build the chief of staff. Don't hire one.

**What does the data say a CEO should pay attention to?**

200 emails a day across personal and BuildClub inboxes (BuildClub — the AI operating system Stephen Forte runs his firm on). 170 wpm dictation speed I sustain with Spokenly — faster than typing or talking.

**What should a CEO do Monday morning after reading The Chief-of-Staff Playbook?**

Start here: Pick one inbox. Build a morning-brief agent against it this week. Approval, not autonomy; Turn on automatic meeting transcription for every call. No exceptions; Choose one memory layer (Zep, Mem0, or a Notion DB). Feed transcripts and decisions into it.

**What are the steps in The Chief-of-Staff Playbook?**

1) Notion is the human-facing surface; 2) Google Drive is the human knowledge layer; 3) GitHub is the agent surface; 4) S3 is agentic storage; 5) Zep + Mem0 sit on top.

**Where do the claims in The Chief-of-Staff Playbook come from?**

The playbook cites YPO Technology Network AI Daily Brief S1E57 — Humans Behind the Automation; BuildClub agent pipeline (Gmail + Anthropic + Apps Script); Zep — temporal knowledge graph for agents; Mem0 — portable memory for AI tools.

## Sources

- [YPO Technology Network AI Daily Brief S1E57 — Humans Behind the Automation](https://ypo.org/ai-brief/humans-behind-the-automation)
- BuildClub agent pipeline (Gmail + Anthropic + Apps Script)
- [Zep — temporal knowledge graph for agents](https://getzep.com)
- [Mem0 — portable memory for AI tools](https://mem0.ai)
- [YPO Technology Network AI Daily Brief — Company Brain](https://ypo.org/ai-brief/company-brain)
- [Fireflies.ai](https://fireflies.ai)
- [Notion — structured project pages](https://notion.so)
- Perplexity Computer (agentic workflows)
- BuildClub daily podcast pipeline
- [Spokenly](https://spokenly.app)
- [YPO Technology Network AI Daily Brief — Humans Behind the Automation](https://ypo.org/ai-brief/humans-behind-the-automation)

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Work with BuildClub: https://buildclub.com/amplify