Signals
Signals let you broadcast a distilled conclusion to your whole organization — an aggregate takeaway like "Project A is at-risk" — and see what your teammates are signaling back. It's how a status reaches the people who need it without ever exposing the private notes behind it: only the one-line conclusion leaves your device, end-to-end encrypted, and the evidence stays yours.
Share the conclusion, not the notes. Zimac is local-first, so sharing is deliberate. A signal is the only correct way to tell the team where something stands: your assistant gathers the private memories behind a takeaway, distills them to a single aggregate statement, and that statement — nothing else — is what can travel. Your raw notes never leave the machine.
◉ One distilled line
An aggregate conclusion — "the migration slipped" — not the notes behind it.
◉ Private by design
Only the statement leaves; a "distilled from N memories" note is yours alone.
◉ End-to-end encrypted
The relay carries a sealed envelope it can't read — peer-to-peer trust.
◉ Two-way
See what your teammates are signaling, all in the Team hub's Signals tab.
What it is#
Signals is one of the three surfaces of the Team hub — the encrypted layer that connects your organization (alongside Broadcasts and Team Asks). Where those send directives and questions, Signals sends status: the distilled conclusions that let a team stay in sync — who's at-risk, what slipped, where the pressure is — without anyone having to hand over the working notes that led there.
Sending a signal#
Ask to share where something stands and your assistant surfaces a signal card: it first gathers the underlying private notes, then distills them into a single aggregate conclusion and shows it to you. You review exactly what will go out, pick a destination, and send. Because the card is the gate, nothing is ever shared until you click.
What leaves your device#
This is the whole point of a signal. The only text that can leave is the aggregate conclusion — so it must be a genuine takeaway, not raw detail. "Project A is at-risk" can travel; "Mitch said he can't finish on time" cannot. On your side, the card carries a private "distilled from N of your memories" disclosure that only you can expand — your teammates never see the sources, only the sentence.
Where a signal goes#
When you send, you pick a destination: a specific paired teammate, or the team brain — the shared space your whole org draws from. Either way it travels end-to-end encrypted: the relay that carries it stores only a sealed envelope it cannot read, so the conclusion is visible to its recipients and to no one in between — not even the server. Same trust model as the rest of the team layer.
Seeing the team's signals#
Signals is two-way. The studio (the Team hub's Signals tab) is also where you see what your teammates are signaling — the distilled conclusions they've chosen to share — so you get the org's status at a glance without pinging anyone. It's a quiet, ambient read on where everyone is, assembled from the same share-the-conclusion discipline you use.