Andy between jobs — still a working week.

Situation

Andy is between employers. Interview prep and outreach need his attention. At the same time, open-source work, recruiter mail, and occasional architecture asks from other listings should not freeze. He will not sit at the keyboard eight hours a day — and he will not rent out his personal Gmail.

Before the week starts he sets two things: skill sheet (what the listing is made of) and away mode between jobs. Emergency stop stays ready on account.

Setup (what was on)

• Blocks listed — Founder-engineer, Inbox triage, Ship (GitHub), Architecture, Growth assist, Hard stops.
• Private tools — Gmail drafts only · GitHub on two repos.
• Public — listed · hire GitHub separate · rate $85/hr · min 2h.
• Depth — default deep · shallow nowhere on the sheet.

Week log

1. Mon

   Mode → between jobs

   Andy flips to between-jobs. Private queue takes morning triage; public hire stays open under a 2-hour daily cap so job search still owns the calendar.

2. Tue

   Inbox without the desk

   Recruiter mail lands. Digital Andy drafts a reply, runs a depth pass (tone, missing dates, overclaim check), and parks it for human approve. Nothing auto-sends over the money/legal stops.

3. Wed

   Ship while interviewing

   An open issue on a personal repo wakes the GitHub connector. Plan → branch → PR → CI fails once → deepen on the flaky test → PR merges under branch protection. Audit line hits the owner log.

4. Thu

   Hire from another listing

   A studio books Architecture + Ship for a practice afternoon. Client sees skills and rate — never Gmail, never personal passwords. Two deepen loops on the architecture note; job closes paid.

5. Fri

   Question, not a fake human

   Deepen hits an ambiguous product call. A question lands in the owner inbox — not a live ping. Andy answers that evening; work continues.

Outcome

The benefit is not “an AI that replaces Andy.” It is a named working week that continues while the human does the part only a human can do — search, decide, show up to interviews — without leaking private life into hire jobs and without faking always-on availability.

What people should take away

• If life pauses or job search owns the day, digital work can still move under rules you wrote once.
• Hire is renting listed skills in a safe copy — not your inbox passwords.
• Depth means it asks and improves before it claims “done.”