Families

The three pulse families: Opportunity, Stall, and Milestone, and what each one asks of you.

Every pulse is stamped with exactly one family, and the family tells you at a glance why the moment matters:

• Opportunity asks you to act on something good, before the window closes.

• Stall means an edge of the loop cannot advance, and the pulse brings the reason and the remedy with it. Work waiting on your call is a stall whose remedy is your click; something going wrong is a stall with its root cause attached.

• Milestone marks a first worth seeing. No action needed; worth ten seconds.

Every stall names the loop edge it fired from, so the pulse never just says "blocked": it says which step, what is in the way, and what would clear it. The full catalog, with the five stall edges and examples per family, lives in Pulse families in Reference.

Families in the app

In the app, the queue is also sorted by tabs: Needs you, Activation, Digest, Setup, Alert, Inbound, and Insight. Tabs group items by what they are and where they came from; the family says why a pulse matters. One pulse carries both, so a failed sync sits in the Alert tab as a Stall, and a hot reply sits in Inbound as an Opportunity.

How families shape behavior

Families and severity tiers are the queue's two filters. A pulse's family also sets expectations for its mode: a decide pulse carries a pending action and can interrupt; an inform pulse never interrupts, it folds into the daily digest and is measured by whether it was worth reading.

Families are stamped by the system, never hand-assigned, so filtering by family always means the same thing, in the app, in email, and in Slack. Per-family delivery preferences are covered in Delivery; acting on a pulse is covered in Acting on a pulse.