The Monday email

Most "daily digest" emails are a list of everything that happened, sent to everyone, every day. You open one, scroll past forty lines about other people's tasks, find nothing about yours, and after a week you set up a rule that files them somewhere you will never look. The digest has not told you anything; it has told you it is not for you.

A summary you actually read has to answer one question — is my week in trouble — and answer it in the first line, before you have scrolled.

The first line

The daily summary sjTasks sends opens with one line you can read on a phone without moving: 2 late · 1 due today · 3 in hand. It counts only what is there. If nothing is late, it does not say 0 late; it leaves it out. If you have no work at all, the email is not sent, because an email that says "you have nothing to do" every morning is how a summary teaches people to ignore it.

That one line is the whole point. On a Monday, standing in the kitchen, it tells you whether to make a coffee or get to the desk.

Then, in this order

Below the line, sections, and only the ones with something in them:

• Late — your work that is past its due date and still open.
• Due today.
• Due later this week.
• In hand — what you have started that is not due this week. Anything already listed by its date is not repeated here.
• Blocked — your work waiting on something before it can move.
• What changed since yesterday — on the tasks you follow, in words: who did what, task by task. A note is quoted in full, not counted, so you read what was said instead of going to look.

Each task shows its project, its due date, and its priority when it is anything other than medium. The order matters: late before today, today before later, your own work before other people's changes. It is the order you would ask about if a colleague were reading it to you.

Written for one person

It is your work — assigned to you — plus what changed on the things you follow. Not the whole team. Sandy's Monday email is about Sandy's week. If she also wants to know what Joe is carrying, that is a question for the Tasks table, not something to push into everybody's inbox every morning.

The clocks are set with the same care. The email goes out at the start of your team's day, so the team is looking at the same morning. What is in it is worked out in your own timezone — your today, your this week — so somebody in Berlin can see a task turn late before somebody in Chicago does, and both are right. The bottom of every summary says which timezone its dates are in.

Monday gets one more

On the first morning of your team's week, a second email arrives alongside the daily one. It looks back and forward: what you finished last week, what is due this week, what is still late, and your open work by priority.

If you are an admin, it has one more section: the whole team rolled up — open tasks, late tasks and estimated hours per person, and which projects are carrying overdue work. That is "who is overloaded and what is slipping" answered before you have opened a browser, which on a Monday is the difference between walking into the stand-up with a question and walking in with the answer.

What it is not

It is not a notification. The things addressed to you personally — a task put on you, a mention, a note on something you watch — arrive on their own, at the time, with the note in full. The summary is the thing you read away from the app, once, in the morning; it does not try to be the bell as well.

And it is a switch. Every email sjTasks sends is a row on your Notifications page with an off position, per team. You can want everything from your own studio and only the weekly summary from a client's team, and the page remembers which is which.

Reading it well

Two habits. First, read the first line and stop if it is calm — the rest of the email will still be there at ten. Second, when it is not calm, the Late section is a list of tasks, each a link; open the one that worries you most and write a note on it. That note reaches the people watching, quoted in full, and the day has started without a meeting. And when the same task is late week after week, look for and in its title — compound tasks are how work gets lost.

The question this answers

The daily summary is Due this week, sorted into late, today and later, sent to you. The same question, live and across the team, is one click.

Show me what is due this week — narrow it to one person from the People menu, and you are reading their Monday email.