Did you customise your Statuses? Thoughts wanted!

I’m thinking about the Popup. The one used by Overview, Label Browser and Contact Browser to see active items.

Currently, it looks like this:

It’s built this way because the assumption with Statuses is there are only 3 types. 1) Things to be done, 2) Things you are waiting on from others, 3) Things that could be done, but have no priority.

It is also assumed that any custom Status labels that you create can only be of type #1: Things to be done. So the logic is that all statuses (except Waiting On / Some Day) go into ‘To Do’.

The main problem with this, other than it may be slightly confusing for first time users, is that I’m increasingly aware that some people create a fairly unique approach to their Statuses; and our assumptive rules are too inflexible.

So, the alternative possibility is this:

Here, each Status has its own tab. The major possible downside is that if people create too many custom Status labels it will become messy and unworkable.

I’d love your input on this, and I think the best question to ask is,

If you have customised your Statuses then how do you use them?

I.e., if you have more Status labels than Action/WaitingOn/SomeDay then please tell us about your workflow.

My own feeling – not to influence your response – is that changing to represent each Status is a good idea. It’s clean, easy to understand, and flexible (and the ‘messy tabs’ concern can be avoided by taking care when creating Status labels).

In case it changes your thoughts, please note that in the future, we will be adding a few bits of functionality related to this:

• The ability to refine (aka ‘drill into’) a view. So, you could be on the ‘To Do’ tab, and then filter that tab to just show ‘Urgent’ items. This is a clean approach, but there is still no permanent visual indication to the number of items in each Status – which you would get with more tabs.
• We could add the ability to sort by Statuses (as you can sort by Projects/Context/Contact now).
  So, you could be in the ‘To Do’ tab, and group the items by their Status. The limitation here is that you cannot group by both Project and Status at the same time (which is what Refine/Filter is intended to solve).
• We are trying to find alternatives so you do not have to use S/Next Action labels (unless you particularly want to) – e.g. Deadlines, Project/Context/Contact Notes.

  

This was written by Andy Mitchell