One week of zero firing = mandatory redesign — change salience, timing, modality, or context specificity immediately

Why This Is a Rule

A trigger that hasn't fired in one week despite being needed is not "having a bad week" — it's dead. Triggers are designed to fire automatically; seven consecutive days of zero activation means the trigger's design is fundamentally mismatched with your actual environment, attention patterns, or routines. Waiting longer won't fix a structural mismatch. Each additional day of non-firing makes the trigger more invisible as your brain deprioritizes it further.

The one-week threshold is based on the behavioral principle that automatic patterns either establish quickly or not at all. If a trigger was going to fire with its current design, it would have produced at least one activation in seven days of normal life. Zero activations in seven days is diagnostic certainty that the current design doesn't work.

The four redesign dimensions — salience, timing, modality, context specificity — cover the four main reasons triggers fail to activate: not noticeable enough (salience), scheduled at a time when you're not receptive (timing), using a sensory channel that's saturated (modality), or designed for a context that doesn't actually occur in your life (context specificity). Changing at least one dimension ensures you're not repeating the same failed design.

When This Fires

• When a trigger has produced zero successful activations for 7 consecutive days
• During weekly agent reviews (Review new agents weekly, established ones monthly, and all agents after major context changes) when checking firing rates
• When you realize you "forgot about" an agent — its trigger died silently
• Complements When triggers fail to fire, increase signal strength through structural methods — don't try to 'remember better' (signal amplification for weak triggers) with a more urgent intervention for completely dead triggers

Common Failure Mode

Giving dead triggers more time: "Maybe next week it'll work." It won't. The trigger's design is the problem, and time doesn't redesign triggers. A second week of hoping produces a second week of zero activations and moves the trigger further from consciousness. Immediate redesign is the only path to recovery.

The Protocol

(1) During weekly review, check: has each trigger produced at least one successful activation this week? (2) Any trigger with zero activations → immediate redesign. (3) Choose which dimension to change: Salience: make it louder, bigger, more visually prominent (When triggers fail to fire, increase signal strength through structural methods — don't try to 'remember better'). Timing: shift to a different time when you're more receptive or the context is more supportive. Modality: switch from visual to auditory, or from digital to physical, or from internal to environmental. Context specificity: make the trigger more tightly bound to a context that actually occurs daily. (4) Deploy the redesigned trigger and track for another week. (5) If still zero → change a second dimension. Two-dimension redesign that still produces zero firings usually means the agent itself (not just the trigger) needs rethinking.