Alerts

What does the product tell you about, and when?

Five things. Open Alerts (/alerts) to see which of them are switched on in your workspace.

The screen states the limit in its own words: “Get told when someone hasn’t started, is idle too long, or uses restricted apps. Each alert is sent at most once per person per day.”

Two different things on one page. The top table is the rules - what the product is watching for. The card underneath is what actually fired, for one day at a time.

The five

Alert	Fires when	The field you set	Default
Hasn’t started work	Nobody has started by a time of day	By (HH:MM)	10:30
Too much idle time	Idle passes a limit	Idle minutes	60
Too much distracting use	Distracting time passes a limit	Distracting minutes	45
Low productivity	Productive share falls under a target	Target %	50
Uses a restricted app or site	A named app or domain is opened	Minutes before alerting	1

A restricted-use rule also needs the list itself: Apps or websites (comma-separated), for example steam, netflix.com.

Each rule is aimed at one team or at Everyone, and sent to Their manager or All admins. Delivery is one of: in-app and email, in-app only, email only, or Slack and in-app.

Reading the screen

Four figures.

Tile	What it counts
Active	Rules currently watching for this condition
Paused	Rules turned off - nothing fires
Critical	Active rules flagging a restricted app or site
Fired today	Alerts sent on the day chosen below

Severity is not something anybody sets. It is worked out from the rule type: a restricted app is Critical, a missed start is High, idle and distraction are Medium, low productivity is Low.

Filter the rules by severity, by Active only or Paused only, by team, or by searching the name.

Note

The team filter here is worth knowing about, because no report in the product has one. If you want “my team only”, alerts is the one screen that can do it. See How the team is doing.

What actually fired

The Alerts sent card below the rules shows the events for one day. The day is a date box in the card header, and it cannot be set past today.

Each row names the rule, the person, the time, and the message.

Caution

Change that date and the “Fired today” column in the rules table changes with it, along with the Fired today tile. The label still says “today” while the numbers are from the day you picked.

Trust the tile’s hint, which spells out the real date, rather than the word on the column.

What an alert does not do

Three things people expect, and the product does not have.

You cannot acknowledge or resolve one

There is no “handled” state and no assignment. The list is a record of what fired, not a queue you work through.

You cannot edit a rule

A rule can be created, paused, resumed or deleted. To change a threshold, the rule is deleted and made again.

Delete happens on the first click. There is no confirmation step, and a deleted rule takes its history of what fired with it.

An alert is not an accusation

“Idle over 45 minutes” fires for a long client call exactly as it fires for an empty chair. Open the person’s timeline before you act on one.

What a manager can do here

Read the rules, and see what fired. That is all.

Creating, pausing and deleting are tenant admin work. A manager sees a line under the heading: “Viewing only - ask a tenant admin to manage Slack, create alerts, or edit alert rules.” The row buttons are greyed out, and the new-alert form is not shown at all.

See Alerts and goals.

Setting thresholds that get read

An alert that fires every day stops being read within a week - and then the one that mattered is missed too.

• Set the idle limit above a normal meeting. 60 minutes, not 20.
• Set the start-time alert after the latest normal start, not the earliest.
• Start with one rule. Add a second only after the first has been useful for a fortnight.
• Count the rows in Alerts sent after a week. More than a handful a day means the threshold is wrong, not the team.

Next: Alerts and goals · How the team is doing