Notifications and summaries

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. A project can also post its news into a Slack channel for the room to see; that is on Slack.

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 team 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 team.

The shape of that list is deliberate. Anything addressed to you personally — your name written, work put on you, your own work coming due, a project opened to you — is worth an email by default. Anything broadcast to the people watching is a bell notification, because five people working through 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.

The How often column is on the settings page too, beside each switch. Choosing between fifteen switches used to mean leaving one on for a week to find out what it costs you.

What an email carries

An email tells you what happened, not just that something did. A note arrives with the note itself, in full. A task put on you arrives with its brief. A burst of changes lists each one on its own line — changed status Open → In progress, moved the due date — and quotes any note written along the way. Under that is the task as it stands: its project, its status, whose it is, and when it is due. You should know what happened from the email alone; the button at the bottom is for replying, not for finding out.

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.

Mentions sit above the list, on their own. Somebody writing your name is asking you a direct question, so that one is not a switch you can clear on your way down the page. You can still turn it off — it is your inbox — but the page asks first and tells you what it will cost. If that box is the last way you would hear, it says nobody will tell you when somebody writes your name; you will have to go and look. If another box is still ticked, it says which one still tells you. Turning it back on takes one click and no questions.

If you are an admin, you can see everyone's. Team settings → Notifications shows every person on the team down the side and every notice across the top. Pick the way of being told — In app or Email — from the buttons above the table, and the ticks are who gets what that way. A tick is what that person gets today. You can change a box for somebody: useful when a new colleague is drowning, or when someone asks you to turn something off for them. They keep every switch on their own page, and the change is written to the team's history with your name on it.

Four more things worth knowing:

• 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 team. You can want everything from your own team and only the weekly summary from a client's. Switch teams and the page shows that team's settings.
• Back to the defaults forgets every choice you have made in this team, rather than writing a new set. It is a genuine undo — and because mentions are on by default, it turns them back on rather than sweeping them away with everything else.
• There is no "turn everything off" button, and that is on purpose. The one sweeping control on the page restores defaults; nothing silences your mentions without naming them first.

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).

Most mail apps show an Unsubscribe link at the top of every email we send you. It stops that one kind of email, for example the daily summary or notes on tasks, and nothing else; the bell keeps telling you. Your notification settings switch it back on.

When our email stops reaching you

If your mail server tells us your address does not exist, or you mark one of our emails as spam, we stop sending to that address — every email, including invitations and password resets. The bell keeps working. To start email again, write to us through the contact form, giving that address, and we will lift the hold.

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, mentions included. The only one that asks you a question on the way is the mention, and it asks once.

The daily summary

One email each morning, sent at the start of your team's day, with the subject sjTasks: Your day on and your team's name. It opens with one line you can read without scrolling — 2 late · 1 due today · 3 in hand — counting only what is there, and each count opens that list. Then, in this order:

• Late — your work 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 that is 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, not just counted, so you read what was said rather than going to look.

Each task shows its reference and title (press either to open it), its project, its due date in words — 3 days late, Due today, Due tomorrow, Due Thu 27 Aug — and, when it is anything other than medium, its priority. Every heading is a link: press Late and the same list opens on your tasks page, already filtered to you, so a count in an email never leaves you to go and find it.

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 team's week, with the subject sjTasks: Your week on and your team's name. It opens with a count line of its own — finished last week, due this week, still late — and then:

• Finished last week — what you completed or were on.
• Due this week.
• Still late.
• Your open work by priority — a count per level, each one a link to that work.

Here too every heading opens the list behind it.

Admins get one more section: a roll-up of the whole team — 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 team'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 only: the daily summary already lists everything late in one place, so there is no separate email nagging you about each one.

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 team'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, next to a Change what we send you link that opens your notification settings.

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

Related

• Replying by email
• Watchers
• The dashboard
• Due dates, estimates, and logging time
• Notes on tasks