The Cockpit is one list, sorted by urgency rather than by source. Understanding it is mostly understanding three things: the four bands, how something arrives in one, and how to read a row at a glance.
The four bands
Every open item sits in exactly one.
Live now
Happening at this moment. A huddle that has started. A call you are being pulled into.
This band is time-critical in the literal sense: leave it ten minutes and the item is not urgent any more, it is missed. If anything is here, deal with it before reading further down the list.
It is usually empty, and that is correct. A permanently occupied Live now band means something is producing false urgency.
Needs you
Blocked on your decision. An expense waiting on approval, a contract awaiting signoff, a task assigned to you, an action item from a meeting you agreed to own.
This is the band that measures whether you are a bottleneck. Everything in it is somebody else waiting on you, whether or not they are chasing. If it is consistently long, the problem is usually not your speed. It is that too many things route through one person, and the fix is upstream of your list.
Waiting
You have done your part. Somebody else, or something else, has not.
Two different situations land here, and they read differently. An approval you passed onward and are now waiting on. And an item still being processed, which in practice mostly means a meeting whose recording is being transcribed and analysed.
You read this band to know what to chase. There is no work to do in it, which is why it belongs below Needs you and above Ready to read.
Ready to read
Finished, and yours to absorb. Meeting summaries. Digests. Notices where nothing is required beyond knowing.
Everything here is optional in the moment and valuable in aggregate. Left alone it accumulates into an intimidating pile; skimmed daily it is where most of what you know about the wider business actually comes from, particularly the parts of it you are not in.
What lands in the list
Fourteen kinds, grouped into five families. The family sets the colour of the icon, so the list is scannable without being read.
| Family | Kinds |
|---|---|
| Meetings | Huddle, Summary |
| Approvals | Expense, Leave, Contract, Deal |
| Signals | Mention, DM, Reaction |
| Actions | Action item, Task |
| Insights | Suggestion, Anomaly, Milestone |
Three of those deserve a note.
Action item is not the same as Task. An action item is something the meeting analysis extracted from what was said: a claim that somebody committed to something. A task is a real record with an owner and a due date. Action items become tasks when you decide they should, and that promotion is one click.
Anomaly and Milestone are unprompted. Nobody sent them. They appear because something in your data changed in a way worth telling you about: a figure moving unusually, or a target being crossed. They are the only items in the list that arrive without a human on the other end.
Reactions are deliberately low-stakes. Somebody responded to something you posted. It is in the list so you know, and it is the item most people dismiss without opening, which is fine.
Reading a row
Each row carries four pieces of information before you read the title.
The kind chip tells you what sort of thing it is, tinted by family.
The state pill tells you which band it belongs to, in that band's colour.
The time pill shows when it is due, and turns rose when that has passed. Overdue is the only thing in the Cockpit that changes colour to shout, which is why it works.
The priority slab shows P1, P2 or P3 as a dark block, and is blank when nothing has been set. Most items have no priority, so a slab in the list genuinely means something.
Rows that arrived while you were looking at the screen briefly highlight, then settle. The highlight fades on purpose: a permanent unread state on a list this size would make the entire list feel unread, which is how people learn to ignore lists.
Where the ranking comes from
Two things, and they are separable.
The source priority, set by whatever produced the item. A contract signoff arrives more urgent than a reaction.
Your own priority, if you set one. Yours wins, and it is personal: overriding an item's priority changes your ranking and nobody else's.
Some items also carry an assessment: a severity, a suggested action, a suggested due date, and the reasoning behind them. This appears inside the drawer, next to the buttons, and it never presses one. It is a recommendation with its basis attached, which you can read or ignore.
The lifecycle
An item moves through states. Most people never need the full vocabulary, but two transitions are worth understanding because they are not obvious.
Open states, roughly in the order they occur:
- Live, happening now
- Pending and Actionable, waiting on you
- Awaiting, waiting on someone else
- Distilling, being processed, typically a recording being analysed
- Distilled and Informational, finished and ready to read
Closed states, which drop out of the list:
- Done, you did the thing
- Dismissed, you decided it did not need you
- Superseded, it turned into something else
- Expired, its moment passed
Dismissed is a real answer
This is the transition people avoid, and it is the one that makes the whole surface work.
Dismissed is not a lesser version of Done. Done means the thing happened. Dismissed means you looked at it, decided it did not require you, and said so. Both close the item, and they are different facts about the world.
A Cockpit where everything is eventually marked Done is a Cockpit somebody is lying to. Most lists contain things that genuinely did not need the person they were routed to, and saying so is the only way routing ever improves. If nobody ever dismisses anything, nobody ever learns that a whole category of item is going to the wrong desk.
Superseded is automatic
You never set this one. When you turn an item into a task, a meeting, or a chat thread, the original is marked superseded and the new record carries a link back to it.
That is deliberate on both sides. The item leaves your list, so the list stays honest. And the trail from "this arrived" to "this became a task" is preserved permanently, so months later you can always answer where something came from.
Items can also carry a parent, which is how a summary knows which meeting produced it, and a note of what produced them, which is how you can tell an automated suggestion from a colleague's request.
Snoozed and closed
Snoozed items vanish until their time arrives, then return to exactly the band they left. Snoozing never de-escalates anything.
Closed items are hidden by default and brought back by a toggle in the filters. Nothing is deleted. If you need to demonstrate what you handled last quarter, it is all there.
It updates itself
The Cockpit subscribes to your own item stream, so new items appear without a refresh.
That matters more than it sounds. A list you have to reload is a list you check; a list that is always current is a list you can leave open on a second screen and glance at.
The strip at the top
Above the bands sits a band about the day rather than the queue.
It carries today's date, a short progress readout of what you have closed, what is overdue and what is live, and the teammates who are online right now as small avatars.
Below that, today's schedule and today's tasks fused into one chronological list. This is the only place in the platform the two appear together, and that is precisely what makes it useful: an afternoon that looks free in the calendar is often not free at all once the tasks due today are on the same line.
The online teammates are there for a reason too. With one or more items selected, the strip offers to assign them, schedule them, start a huddle about them, or post them into a chat room. Seeing who is around is what turns "I should ask somebody about this" into asking somebody about it.
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