Notifications and summaries

The bell, the emails, the daily and weekly summaries — and exactly which switch turns each one off.

sjTasks tells you what changed on the work you follow. There are two places it can reach you — the bell in the top bar and your email — and one page where you decide which.

Who gets told at all is the watcher list: see Watchers. This page is about what arrives, and where.

The bell

The bell sits at the top right with the number of unread notifications on it. Open it and you get your most recent ones, unread first.

Looking is not reading. Opening the panel marks nothing. A count that empties itself because you glanced at it is a count you stop trusting.
Reading one marks it. Click a notification and you go to the thing it is about, and that one is marked read. Mark all read is a button you press on purpose.
A notification from another workspace switches you to it first, so following it lands on the work rather than on a page telling you it does not exist.

Every notification is written at the moment it happens and never rewritten, so a message about a task that has since been renamed still says what it said when it was true.

What you are told about, and where

These are the defaults. Every one of them is a switch you can flip, per workspace.

Event	Bell	Email
A task is assigned to you	●	●
Your work is due soon	●	●
Your work is late	●	●
Someone writes a note on something you watch	●	●
Someone mentions you	●	●
You are added to a project	●	●
A task is created in a project you watch	●
A task you watch is edited	●
A task you watch changes status	●
A task you watch is finished	●
A file is attached to something you watch	●
A task is taken off you	●
Daily summary		●
Weekly summary		●

The shape of that list is deliberate. Anything addressed to you personally — assigned to you, your work is late, you were mentioned — is worth an email by default. Anything broadcast to watchers is a bell notification, because five people editing a busy project should not fill your inbox. The two summaries are email only: a summary is the thing you read away from the app.

Choosing what we send you

Under your name at the top right: Notifications.

The page lists every event above with its two switches, grouped under Tasks, Due dates, Notes and mentions, Files, Projects and Summaries. Flip one and it saves immediately — no form to submit.

Three things worth knowing about it:

Untouched means "whatever the sensible default is". If you never express an opinion about an event, you get the default — including any improvement we make to it later. Only the switches you actually touch are stored as yours.
Preferences belong to a workspace. You can want everything from your own team and only the weekly summary from a client's. Switch workspaces and the page shows that workspace's settings.
Back to the defaults forgets every choice you have made in this workspace, rather than writing a new set. It is a genuine undo.

The same page has Quiet projects — a list of the projects you can see, each with a Mute button. Muting a project keeps every bit of access you had and stops it telling you anything.

To go quiet on one task rather than a whole project, use Stop watching this task on the task itself (Watchers).

Three rules we hold ourselves to

1. You are never told about your own action. Nothing you do generates a notification for you.

2. A burst becomes one message. Changes to the same task, for the same person, inside five minutes arrive as one notification — "Jane made 4 changes to ACME-142" — not as four. The window is fixed at the first change and never extends, so a message can never be deferred indefinitely by somebody who keeps working. Only the broadcast events wait; anything addressed to you personally goes out at once, because delaying "this is now yours" would help nobody.

3. Nothing arrives that you cannot turn off. Every row in the table above is a switch.

The daily summary

One email each morning, sent at the start of your workspace's day. It contains, in this order:

Late — your work past its due date and still open.
Due today.
Due later this week.
What changed since yesterday — on the tasks you follow, in words: who did what, task by task.

If there is nothing to say, nothing is sent. An email that says "you have no work" every morning is how a summary teaches people to ignore it.

The weekly summary

On the first morning of your workspace's week:

Finished last week — what you completed or were on.
Due this week.
Still late.
Your open work by priority — a count per level.

Admins get one more section: a roll-up of the whole workspace — open tasks, late tasks and estimated hours per person, and which projects are carrying overdue work. It is the "who is overloaded, what is slipping" question answered without opening the app.

Due soon, and overdue

Two sweeps run each morning in your workspace's timezone:

Due soon — a task assigned to you falls due tomorrow. Bell and email.
Overdue — a task assigned to you has passed its due date and is still open. Bell and email.

Both go to the person the work is on, not to watchers, because "your thing is late" is addressed to one person.

Two clocks, both correct

When something is sent is your workspace's morning, so colleagues are looking at the same list at the same time. What is in it is worked out in your timezone — your today, your this week — which is why somebody in Berlin can legitimately see a task turn late before somebody in Chicago does. Every summary email says at the bottom which timezone its dates are in.

A workspace that has been switched to read-only sends nothing at all.