Finding things and answering questions
Saved views and the standard questions
The nine questions every team can already answer, how to save your own views, and how a saved view can email itself on a schedule.
A report in sjTasks is not a separate thing you build. It is a filtered Tasks list with a name on it — the same filters, the same rows, the same pasteable link. That is the whole design, and it is why there is no second place where "overdue" could come to mean something different.
Two kinds: the questions we ship, and the ones you save.
The questions you already have
Every team has these from day one. You do not have to build the obvious view before the product is useful.
| Question | What it lists |
|---|---|
| Past due | Open work whose date has been and gone |
| Due this week | What has to land before the week is out |
| Due next week | The week after this one, so you can see it coming |
| Finished in the last 7 days | What actually landed, newest first |
| Unassigned open work | Nobody has picked these up yet |
| High and urgent | Everything open that someone said matters most |
| No due date | Open work with no date on it at all |
| Some Day backlog | The parking lot. Worth a read once a week |
| Waiting for your OK | Raised, and waiting for an admin before it counts as the team's work |
The ninth appears only on a team that has switched approval on for somebody — see Tasks that need approval; a team that never uses it never sees it.
They live in two places: the Frequently used card on your dashboard, each showing a live count of what it matches right now, and the Views menu at the right of the Tasks page's menus. Choose one and the Tasks table takes those filters and keeps the question's name at the top of the page — at which point it is an ordinary list you can narrow further.
Finished in the last 7 days is the one people reach for most. Add a name from the People menu and you have "everything Joe did last week" — see Finding things.
These nine are permanent. Saving views of your own never costs you them.
Saving your own
- Filter the Tasks table until it is showing the question you keep asking.
- Open the Views menu, choose Save current view…, and give it a name.
- It appears in that menu and on your dashboard, above the standard questions, with its own live count.
That is all a saved view is: a name plus the filters that were on screen. Opening one puts you back at that address, so it is still a link you can paste into an email.
If you have wandered away from a saved view's filters, the page says so and offers you two honest choices: point the view at what you are looking at now, or stop calling the list by that name. Save current view… is always there for keeping the new question under a new name.
Keeping them tidy, on the dashboard
The Frequently used card has a Manage control. Press it and the cards become rows, each of your own views carrying every control it needs:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Move up / Move down | The order they sit in |
| Rename | |
| Take off the dashboard / Put on the dashboard | It stays saved either way |
| Share with the team / Make it private | |
| Delete | The saved view goes; the tasks are untouched |
Views you have taken off the dashboard stay visible while you are managing, marked Off your dashboard, so taking one off is never a one-way door. The nine standard questions have no controls: they are not yours to rename or delete.
Sharing shares the question, never the answers
Share with the team makes a view visible to everyone in the team. What they get is the question — the filters. The rows each person sees are still only the work they are allowed to see, so sharing a view can never widen anybody's access. That is worth saying plainly, because it is the thing people are right to worry about.
A view a colleague has shared with you is theirs to rename or delete, not yours — but Keep a copy on its row on the Saved views page saves the same filters under your own name, private and on your dashboard, so you can make it yours from there.
The Saved views page
The dashboard card holds what you want in front of you. All saved views in that card's heading, or Manage views in the Tasks page's Views menu, is the full shelf:
- Yours, pinned or not, in the order you arranged them.
- Shared with the team — other people's shared views, which you can open and use.
- Built in — the nine above, permanently.
Every control on that page is the same control as on the dashboard, so it does not matter which one you use.
A view that emails itself
Any view of your own can be sent to you, or to colleagues, without anyone opening the app. On the Saved views page, a view's … menu has Email it on a schedule…: choose every morning or one morning a week on the day you pick, and tick who gets it. It arrives at 8 in each person's own time, and it carries the tasks themselves — reference, title, who, due date and status, up to fifty with the total — so the answer is in the email and the link is there for acting on it. If nothing matches, the email says so; that is the report. Stop emailing it in the same menu ends it. Only the owner of a view can schedule it, and only admins and members can receive it.
A view that has outlived its filters
If a saved view names a project that has since been archived away, or a person who has left, it still opens and still says what it was asking for. The chip admits the problem in words — "In acme — that project is no longer here" — and the list narrows to nothing rather than quietly returning the wrong rows.
Who is carrying what
Workload, linked from the dashboard's Frequently used card, is one row per person: how many open tasks they have, how many are late, how many land this week, and the hours estimated on their open work and the hours logged this month. Unassigned work has a row of its own, Nobody yet, because work nobody has picked up is the thing that slips. A person's name opens their open tasks. It answers "who is overloaded" before Friday does; guests never see it. If your team uses tags, a Tag menu at the top narrows every column to the work carrying one — who is carrying the #retainer work — and every number then opens the Tasks list with the same tag. If your team uses clients, a Client menu beside it does the same for one client's projects: who is carrying the Acme work.
Who did what
Who did what, linked from the same place, is the team's own record read by person. Pick a person or everyone, pick a window — the same choices as Finished last week, or two dates of your own — and every change they made is there, day by day, in the same words the task's history uses: created acme-142, changed status Open → Done, added a note, logged 1.5h. Each row opens the task or project it happened on, and a name at the top narrows the page to that person. There is a CSV of it too. "What did Sandy do last week" is answered here, not by reading every task she touched.
An admin sees the whole team, including changes to the team itself and when each person signed in and signed out — so "who has been in today" is answered here too. A member sees what happened on the projects they can see, and only the people they share a project with. Guests never see it.
Hours, which are not a list of tasks
One report is a different shape from the rest. Hours logged totals the time put against tasks by person and by project over a window of days, every task's hours set against its estimate with how far over or under, every entry underneath (the first 2,000 on the page; the totals and the CSV count them all), and a CSV export for invoicing. Its Billable table splits the hours into billable and not, from the Billable switch, which is how billable against the rest is answered; its By tag table sets the hours on each tag against everything else. Its Client menu narrows the whole report to one client's projects, which is how what do we bill Acme this month is answered; a client's own page shows the same hours. It has its own page rather than a saved view, because a total is not a filtered list. It is described with the rest of time tracking in Dates, estimates and time.
The line beside the report's link on your dashboard says how many hours were logged this month. It counts the hours on work you can see, so it is the whole team's total only for admins and for members who see every project.
On paper
Hours logged and Workload each have a Download PDF button beside the CSV, and so do a client's page and a project page. The PDF is the page exactly as you have it filtered — the same dates, project, person, tag, client and, on Hours logged, billable or not — laid out to print or to send: a heading that says what it is and when it was printed, then the same tables. It takes a few seconds; the button says Making the PDF… and the download starts on its own. If it takes longer than that, it says so and we email you when it is ready, so you can close the page. The file is yours alone — it shows what you can see — and it can be downloaded for a week.
Pressing Print in your browser works on these pages too: the menus, filters and buttons are left off, and the tables print on their own.