Representing Unresolved Work as Revisable Continuity State

Most productivity software represents work as tasks, reminders, messages, or calendar events. That representation is useful, but incomplete. In communication-heavy work, the important unit is often not a task that someone remembered to enter. It is an unresolved obligation or expectation distributed across people, evidence, tools, and time. Someone may owe a reply, a user may be waiting on approval, a recurring responsibility may be slipping, or a follow-up may become relevant because an expected transition did not occur. This technical position paper argues that unresolved work should be represented as revisable continuity state rather than merely extracted tasks. It proposes a product-oriented computational framework built on three foundations: social commitments, partial observation, and temporal lifecycle reasoning. The framework introduces the concept of a continuity loop: a reviewable and revisable representation of unresolved work containing actors, obligations or expected outcomes, evidence, temporal constraints, dependencies, lifecycle state, and an interpretation or hypothesis state. It also discusses negative evidence, observation coverage, evidence precedence, contradiction handling, lifecycle invariants, review-first state correction, and evaluation criteria beyond ordinary task-extraction accuracy. The paper maps these ideas to practical continuity primitives currently implemented in Vortyx while clearly distinguishing current product behaviour from open design and research questions. Synve Technical Position Paper No. 1, Version 1.0. This is a non-peer-reviewed technical position paper and does not report experimental results. Canonical web version: https://synve.ai/research/representing-unresolved-work