Questions, not reports

It is Monday, nine o'clock, and you want to know three things. What did Sandy finish last week. What is on Joe's plate this week. And whether anyone is carrying more than they can land by Friday. You do not want a dashboard with fourteen charts. You want three answers, and you want them before the ten o'clock call.

In most tools the route to those answers is a report builder: pick columns, pick groupings, name it, save it, and then discover on Tuesday that it counts the wrong thing. We think that is backwards. A report should be a question you asked, and the answer should be a list.

A report is a filtered list with a name on it

That is the whole design in sjTasks. The Tasks table shows every task you are allowed to see. Along the top are five menus — status, project, people, dates, priority — and every choice you make lands in the address bar. Filter it until it shows the question you keep asking, and you have your report. Give it a name from the Views menu and it waits on your dashboard with a live count.

Because a report is just filters, there is no second place where "overdue" could come to mean something different from what the table means. The list you look at and the number on the dashboard card are the same query. They cannot disagree.

The three Monday questions, one by one

What did Sandy finish last week? Status: Done. Dates: Finished in the last 7 days. People: Sandy. That is it — three menus, or one click on the standard view Finished in the last 7 days and then Sandy's name. The rows are what actually landed, newest first, each with its project and its reference. Paste the address into a message to Sandy and she sees the same list.

What is on Joe's plate this week? Status: Open. Dates: Due this week. People: Joe. If it is a long list and Joe is one person, you already know something. Add priority — High and urgent — to see what on it actually matters.

Who is overloaded before Friday? This one is honest work rather than one click. Run Due this week and change the name in the People menu, one person at a time; three or four people takes a minute and you see the counts. If you are an admin, the weekly summary email carries a roll-up of the whole team — open tasks, late tasks and estimated hours per person, and which projects are carrying overdue work — which is the same question answered before you have opened anything. A single workload screen is on the way; the two routes above are what is built today.

Eight questions you do not have to build

Every team starts with the standard questions already answered: Past due, Due this week, Due next week, Finished in the last 7 days, Unassigned open work, High and urgent, No due date, and the Some Day backlog. They sit on your dashboard with live counts and in the Views menu on the Tasks page. Nobody has to build the obvious report before the product is useful, and these eight cannot be renamed or deleted, so they are always there.

Your own saved views sit above them. Save Acme, high and urgent, due next week once and it is a card on Monday morning for as long as Acme is a client.

Sharing shares the question, not the answers

Share a saved view with the team and what they get is the filters. The rows each person sees are still only the work they are allowed to see, so a shared view can never widen anybody's access. Sandy can share Overdue in Acme with the whole studio; the guest from Acme opens it and sees only Acme, because that is all they could see anyway.

Sending a link works the same way. Every filtered list is an address you can paste into an email, and the person who opens it gets the same question asked against what they can see. That is the difference between sending someone a report and sending someone instructions for building one.

What this deliberately is not

There is no grouping and no subtotals on screen — you get rows and a count. There is no scheduled email of a saved view; the daily and weekly summaries are what arrive by mail, and they carry what is late. Those gaps are named on the features page and will close in that order. What is here is the part that matters most: any question you can ask with the menus is a list, a link and a card, in under a minute, with no report builder in between.

The question this answers

Start with the one people reach for most.

Show me what was finished in the last 7 days — then pick a name from the People menu and it is that person's week. Save it, and Monday is already answered.