---
name: mohitagw15856/office-hours-design
source: https://app.decimal.ai/s/mohitagw15856-office-hours-design@1/SKILL.md
source_sha256: ab697a81ac94
---

# Office Hours Design Skill

Office hours are a trade: the expert's interruptions get batched into scheduled availability, and everyone else gets *guaranteed access* instead of guilty pinging. The trade fails in two ways — hours nobody attends (usually a routing failure: people don't know what belongs there, or the barrier to showing up beats the barrier to pinging) and hours that overflow into triage. Both are design problems: the slot fits the actual demand pattern, the routing card tells people exactly what goes where (and what should *never* wait for Thursday), and the format makes showing up cheaper than interrupting.

## What This Skill Produces

- **The slot design** — cadence, length, and format (drop-in vs. bookable segments) matched to demand
- **The routing card** — goes-to-office-hours / ask-in-channel / never-waits — the three-way sort, postable
- **The session format** — the queue mechanics, the timebox-per-person, and the everyone-learns option (public answers)
- **The tuning rules** — the empty-hours and overflow diagnoses, and the adjustments each triggers

## Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:
- **The interruption pattern** — what people currently come for, how often, how urgent-really; the design fits the demand that exists, and a week's tally beats impressions
- **The expert's goals** — protecting maker time? Scaling their knowledge? Both change the format (protection wants strict routing; scaling wants public answers and recorded sessions)
- **The audience's alternatives** — what people do when the expert is unavailable (block? guess? ship wrong?) — the never-waits line is drawn by the cost of blocking
- **The platform** — bookable calendar slots, a drop-in call link, a channel thread — the mechanics use real tools

## Framework: The Design Rules

1. **Fit the slot to the demand tally:** count a normal week's interruptions — volume and shape pick the design (a dozen small questions → twice-weekly 45-minute drop-ins; four deep consults → bookable 25-minute segments with a topic-required field). Designing from the ideal calendar instead of the real demand is why hours sit empty while pings continue.
2. **The routing card does the enforcement:** three lines, posted where people ask — *Office hours:* design reviews, "am I on the right track," non-blocking questions. *Channel (async, ~24h):* quick factuals. *Now, always:* production down, blocked-today, anything a delay makes expensive. The never-waits line matters most — office hours that swallow emergencies teach people to bypass the whole system, correctly.
3. **Make attending cheaper than pinging:** no agenda required, camera-optional, "bring the half-formed thing" explicitly welcomed — the psychological price of showing up must undercut the guilt-ping, or economics routes around the design. The redirect script keeps it kind: "good one for Thursday's hours — grab the 2:10 slot" (with the never-waits check first).
4. **Public-by-default answers scale the expert:** questions answered in the open session (others listening, notes posted after) convert one answer into team knowledge — the [faq-builder](../faq-builder/SKILL.md) capture loop feeds directly from office-hours notes. Sensitive topics get the private segment; everything else compounds.
5. **Tune by failure mode:** empty hours → check routing awareness (do people know?), attendance friction (is booking annoying?), and slot timing (is it during everyone's crunch?) — usually fixable; genuinely low demand → shrink the slot, don't perform availability. Overflow → the demand tally was wrong: add a slot, tighten per-person timeboxes, or split audiences. Review at week 4 and week 12, then quarterly.

## Output Format

# Office Hours: [expert/team] — [cadence × length, format]

## The Slot Design
[Cadence/length/format + the demand-tally reasoning · booking mechanics on (platform)]

## The Routing Card (post this)
**Office hours:** … · **Channel (~24h):** … · **Never waits:** … 
[The redirect script, verbatim]

## Session Format
[Queue mechanics · per-person timebox · public-by-default + the private segment · notes → the FAQ loop]

## Tuning
[Week-4 and week-12 checks · the empty diagnosis tree · the overflow adjustments]

## Quality Checks

- [ ] The slot design cites a real demand tally
- [ ] The routing card's never-waits line is explicit and generous
- [ ] Attending is designed to be cheaper than interrupting
- [ ] Answers default to public with a capture route
- [ ] Tuning checkpoints are calendared with their diagnosis trees

## Anti-Patterns

- [ ] Do not design from the ideal calendar — the demand tally is the ground truth
- [ ] Do not let office hours absorb emergencies — the never-waits line protects the system's credibility
- [ ] Do not require polished questions — the half-formed thing is exactly what office hours are for
- [ ] Do not answer everything privately — private answers scale linearly; public ones compound
- [ ] Do not perform empty availability — genuinely low demand means a smaller slot, honestly held