Action-item closure

A meeting ends with six actions, three of which get done and three of which disappear. Nobody can tell which is which, so the same task is added again next week and the team believes work is moving when it is not. The workflow makes every action a record with three fields: owner, date, and state. The state is one of open, done, handed off, or dropped, and dropped is a real answer that stops the item from coming back. Actions are captured once, in one place, within a day of the conversation, because the format matters more than where it happened. Anything agreed verbally in a corridor or a DM gets the same entry. One weekly pass lists everything open past its date and asks the owner for one of the three closing moves. An item handed to somebody else changes hands in the same pass, so the trail shows where it went and who is holding it now. A person still decides who owns an item nobody claimed, whether a silent item is finished or simply forgotten, and what a missed date actually means. The measure is simple: no action stays open past its date without a reason.