For chiefs of staff: running yourself, your exec and the leadership team
A practical guide to capturing what crosses your desk, briefing your exec without chasing links across five tools, and giving the leadership team one shared, searchable record of what's been decided and done.
Eight short chapters, adapted from Humble's own chief of staff playbook. Jump to whichever one made you open this page — each stands alone.
Start here
After this chapter you'll know what this guide covers and whether it's the right one for you.
This guide is for chiefs of staff, or anyone doing that job under a different title — head of the exec office, business manager to the CEO, whatever your card says. You hold the connective tissue of the business: the exec's priorities, the leadership team's decisions, the projects moving across every function. None of that lives in one place by default — it's spread across Slack, inbox, docs and your own memory.
This guide isn't about the job itself — plenty of good writing already covers that. It's about the mechanics: where things live, how you capture them without losing them, how you hand work off without it disappearing, and how you stop being the only place any of this is written down.
It's written from how Humble is actually used by chiefs of staff, so the practices below assume you're using it — but the underlying habits (capture in flow, one shared record instead of five) hold up whatever tool you use.
Use the chapters in any order.
How do I stop rebuilding context from memory?
After this chapter you'll know how to capture what crosses your desk once, in the place you found it, instead of reconstructing it later.
The short answer: your day is fragmented by design — meetings, follow-ups, research and decisions land in different tools, and you're the one expected to hold it all together. The fix isn't a better memory. It's capturing things where they happen, so nothing depends on you remembering it correctly three days later.
Capture where you find it
Add a note on any page — an email, a Google Doc, a LinkedIn profile, a webpage — so the context gets logged where it happened, not reconstructed from memory afterwards. Research you run in Claude or ChatGPT for the exec stays attached to the task it was for too, so it's findable weeks later instead of buried in a chat history you'd have to scroll back through.
Triage into now, next and later
- One prioritised list, not five. Everything you're holding goes into now, next or later, so when the list gets long you still know what actually needs doing today.
- Switch to a board view when it's busy. A kanban view earns its keep once there's a lot in flight across several workstreams at once — seeing columns fill up tells you something a flat list doesn't.
See every calendar you're juggling
See the exec's diary, your own, and the leadership cadence together, instead of switching between calendars to find a gap. If you've ever double-booked yourself because you were checking the wrong tab, this is the fix.
How do I brief the exec without chasing five links?
After this chapter you'll know how to hand off work with everything attached, and see when it's actually done without asking.
The short answer: briefing the exec usually means chasing down the right deck, the right doc, the right context — then following up to check it actually got done. Both halves of that are fixable: attach everything to the task up front, and let completion show up on your side automatically instead of relying on a follow-up message.
Send tasks with everything attached
Send a task to the exec with the deck, the sheet and the doc already linked, so they open one thing, not a thread of links scattered across email and Slack. The same goes the other way: assign a piece of prep to someone on your team and it appears on their side directly, no separate ping needed to make sure they saw it.
Completion, without chasing
When the exec ticks off a shared task, it shows up on your timeline on its own. No follow-up message required, no "did you get to that yet" — you just look.
Carry context between meetings, not just tasks
- People notes that travel with the meeting. Contacts sync automatically from meetings, so your private notes on someone — what they prefer, what to double-check before they see it — are there the next time you meet them, not lost in an old notebook.
- Notes alongside the call, not in a separate window. Open a new tab next to your Google Meet call and take notes without switching windows, so you can still see everyone's face and stay in the conversation while jotting down what matters. This works alongside automated meeting notetakers, not against them — it needs the browser extension installed, with "Open Humble on new tabs" turned on.
How do I give the leadership team one shared picture?
After this chapter you'll know how to turn "what's leadership working on" from a deck someone has to build into something you can just look at.
The short answer: nobody has a shared view of what leadership is actually working on today, so a status update usually means someone stopping what they're doing to build a deck. The fix is a shared record that builds itself from what's already happening, rather than from what someone remembered to write down.
One shared space, with clear owners
One space holds the leadership team's priorities and cross-functional projects, each task with a clear owner. Hand a piece of the agenda to the right person and it's on their list, not just in a meeting note nobody reopens.
The timeline is the update
Filter the progress timeline to this week or this month and that's your status report — built from what actually happened, not what someone remembered to write up. Come board or investor prep, filter to the reporting period and pull directly from the record instead of rebuilding it from scratch each cycle.
A searchable decision log
Tag notes by initiative so "what did we decide about X" is a search, not a memory test — useful the first time someone new joins a project and needs the backstory in one go rather than five separate Slack threads.
Engineering progress, without asking
Connect GitHub and commits flow straight into the timeline, so you can see what's shipping without pinging the team for a status update they'd have to stop and write.
How do I read across every function without a login in six places?
After this chapter you'll know how the work already happening in other tools ends up on your one timeline.
You're reading across every function's system without living inside any of them. Humble connects to Slack, HubSpot, Linear, GitHub, Notion and Airtable, so what happens in each shows up in your one view — you don't need a login in six places to know what's going on. This works the same way as the GitHub connection in chapter 04: connect it once, and the relevant activity turns up on the timeline on its own.
What does setup actually involve?
After this chapter you'll know exactly what to click, in what order, and how long it takes.
Setup takes about five minutes:
- Connect the browser extension. This is what lets you add a note from any webpage and take notes alongside a live call.
- Link your calendars. Your own, the exec's, and the leadership cadence — so chapter 02's "every calendar, one view" works from day one.
- Turn on "Open Humble on new tabs". Needed specifically for taking notes alongside a Google Meet call, as covered in chapter 03.
If your organisation pays for Humble, ask your admin to add you on the Professional tier so every integration in chapter 05 is included from the start.
See Humble for chiefs of staff
Everything in this guide is built into Humble today, not on a roadmap. If you'd rather see it than read about it, the chiefs of staff page walks through the same ground as this guide — capturing context, briefing your exec, giving the leadership team a shared record — as an actual product tour, with the screens alongside the explanation.
About this guide
Who wrote this and when it was last checked.
This guide is written by the team at Humble, based on how chiefs of staff actually use the product day to day. Unlike our ADHD and workplace guides, it isn't independently sourced advice — it's a practical playbook for one specific role, and it describes Humble as of September 2026; some details may have moved on since.
Last reviewed: 15 September 2026.
Found something wrong, or missing? Email us — we read everything.
More on the way
This is the first guide in a new series on using Humble well in a specific role. More are coming — in the meantime:
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New role guides as they're published. Occasional, not frequent.
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