Work items, decisions and the inbox

Tracking the work, questions that need a person, and where they reach you.

Work items

A work item is one piece of work in a project (a matter, deal, ticket, campaign, model or repo change), with a person responsible, an optional reviewer and a status. Sessions, documents and decisions can be linked to it, and its page shows them together. Start a session on an item from its page.

Decisions

When an agent reaches something only a person can decide, it files a decision with its recommendation. The decision lands in the team's shared, governed queue, and the answer is passed back to the session that asked.

The inbox

• Inbox: where you work the team's shared queue. You see decisions that need a human, including ones anyone may answer, on the boards you can see (answer them right there), plus sessions passed to you, your sessions that failed or are blocked, sessions you watch, mentions, reviews, and scheduled jobs that failed.
• The bell previews recent alerts and links into Inbox, where you handle the work. Reading an alert does not resolve its decision or failure. Turn on Browser notifications from the fold in Inbox to receive alerts on this device.

Keeping the working set small

The badge counts what is asked of you: decisions addressed to you, sessions waiting on you, failed jobs, reviews and mentions. Decisions anyone may answer are listed apart, under a fold, with their own count, and decisions older than the workspace's window are listed under Older decisions; a decision past its due day is marked overdue, and you can extend it a week or close it from its row.

An hourly reaper keeps the number of open sessions down. A session started by a scheduled job is retired soon after its run succeeds when nobody wrote in it; a session that stopped, failed or sat waiting is retired after the days or hours the workspace sets. A session that is running, holds an open decision or waits on a person is never retired, and nothing is ever deleted: a retired session keeps its transcript and a new message reopens it. The same pass closes the older copies of a question that was asked again, and decisions whose due day passed long ago with no answer, each with the reason as its answer.

An administrator edits the rules in Settings → Sessions & inbox (or evriq lifecycle), sees what the rules would retire now under Close old sessions on the inbox page (or evriq lifecycle reap --dry-run), and can retire a chosen set from there. Setting any rule to 0 turns it off.