People, access, and being told
Tasks that need approval
The switch that makes one person's new tasks wait for an admin, what the two sides see, why Urgent goes straight through, and what waiting work does to every number.
Most teams never turn this on. Some want one person's ideas to reach an admin before they reach everybody's list: a new hire in their first month, a subcontractor who raises work as they find it, an eager member whose suggestions keep landing in other people's weeks.
That is one switch on one person, not a role and not a workflow. Everything else about them stays the same.
Turning it on
An admin opens Team → People, finds the person, and ticks Tasks need approval. It is off for everybody, on every team, until somebody ticks it. A team that never wants it never sees it: no extra bucket, no extra number, nothing on any screen.
It belongs to one team. Somebody can be a member whose work waits on one team and the admin who approves on another, and neither team learns anything about the other.
It is for members only. Admins are who approve, so their own work never waits, and a guest cannot raise a task at all.
What the person raising work sees
Nothing changes as they add the task. They type it the way they always have and it appears on their list.
Open it and there is a line at the top: Waiting for Admin Approval — those words, not a person's name, because whichever admin gets to it first is not the author's problem to solve. Under it: It is here. It does not count in the team's numbers until an admin says yes. Mark it Urgent if it cannot wait.
Until an admin says yes:
- it is in none of the team's numbers — not the project's 12 of 20 done, not the board, not the workload report, not anybody's overdue count, not the daily or weekly summary;
- nobody is told about it, including whoever it was assigned to. Being handed work that might be cancelled an hour later is the thing this switch exists to prevent;
- the person who raised it still sees it everywhere they would normally see their own work, and it is still theirs to edit.
When it is approved they get an email and a line in the bell, and from that moment it counts everywhere and the person it was assigned to is told.
What an admin sees
Waiting work is gathered in one place called Waiting for your OK, on the dashboard and in the list of views. The task itself carries the same panel with an Approve button on it.
Approving is one click. It is written into the task's history like every other change, and it tells the author.
There is no Reject. An admin who does not want the work marks it Canceled, which the product already has and already explains, and which tells the author in the usual way. Cancelled work is not open, so it leaves the waiting list on its own. This is a sanity check, not a ticketing system.
Urgent goes straight through
A task marked Urgent is approved the moment it is raised, by anybody. If the building is on fire, the rule is a bottleneck, and a rule people have to route around is worse than no rule. The approver still sees it went by, in the task's history.
Editing does not send it back
The question an admin is answering is "does this belong on our list", not "do I agree with this wording". Fixing a typo, adding a note, changing the due date: none of it puts an approved task back in the queue, and none of it changes a waiting one's place in it.