The Cockpit is designed to be worked top to bottom once a day. Everything in this piece is about making that pass shorter and more honest.
The command bar
One row above the list, holding search, filters, whose work you are seeing, and the actions. It replaced an earlier two-deck arrangement, and the compression is the point: the controls should not take more vertical space than the list they control.
Search
Matches titles and summaries. The fastest way to find one specific thing you half remember, and the only control most people need on a quiet day.
Time
Three buckets, and they combine: Today, This week, Older.
Selecting Older on its own is the most useful and least obvious combination. It shows you what has been sitting in your list long enough to be embarrassing, which is exactly the set that deserves a decision rather than another day.
Kind
Four quick filters: Huddles, Approvals, Mentions, Actions.
These map to families rather than individual kinds. Approvals covers expenses, leave, contracts and deals together, because when you are in an approving frame of mind you want all of them and not one at a time.
Priority and due date
P1+ narrows to the top two priority levels. Has a due date narrows to items with a real deadline attached rather than an implied one.
Combining the two produces the closest thing available to a "what will actually go wrong today" view, and it is worth knowing about on a bad morning.
Whose work
Three scopes: Mine, Team, All.
Mine is your own queue and the default.
Team shows your reports and peers, worked out from the reporting structure rather than from a list somebody maintains. It is what a manager wants on a Monday, and the useful reading is not what your team is doing but what your team is stuck behind.
All is only available where your permissions allow it. It is a diagnostic view rather than a working one: nobody clears a whole organisation's Cockpit, and trying is a good way to waste a morning.
Show closed
Off by default. Turning it on brings back everything you marked done or dismissed, in place, so you can see what you did rather than only what remains.
Worth switching on at the end of a week, and off again immediately afterwards.
Saved views
Any combination of the above can be saved with a name, and saved views appear as pills alongside the filters.
They are yours alone. Nobody else sees your views, yours do not change when a colleague changes theirs, and there is no shared or inherited set to keep in sync.
Three that earn their place for most people:
Approvals only, mine. Five minutes at the start of the day that unblocks other people. This is the single highest-value view in the product for anybody with a team.
Older, no other filter. The weekly honesty pass. Run it on a Friday.
P1 and P2 with a due date, this week. What Friday is going to judge you on.
Adding a fourth rarely helps. A saved view you do not click is another pill to scan past, and the value of the row drops with every one you add.
Selecting and acting in bulk
Rows carry a checkbox on the left. With one or more selected, the strip at the top offers four actions.
Assign hands them to somebody. This is the only one of the four that sensibly takes many items at once.
Schedule turns the selection into a calendar event.
Start huddle opens a call about it, with the people you choose.
Discuss posts it into a chat room.
Each requires a selection first and will say so if you have not made one. The last three are for one thing you want to talk about rather than a batch.
The bulk assign is the underused one. A manager who has just realised that eleven items in their queue are actually somebody else's work can move all eleven in a single action, and should.
How to actually clear it
The pass that works, in order.
Live now first, immediately. These expire, and an expired live item is a missed meeting.
Needs you next, and decide rather than defer. Every item here has three honest outcomes:
- Do it now, if it takes under two minutes.
- Turn it into something scheduled, if it does not.
- Dismiss it, if it did not need you.
"Leave it and see how it feels tomorrow" is not one of the three, and it is the single reason lists grow past the point of being read.
Waiting is a read, not a task. Scan it. Note anything that has been waiting longer than it should. Chase that one thing. Move on. Ten seconds, not ten minutes.
Ready to read last, and skim. Open what matters, dismiss the rest. Summaries of meetings you attended rarely need a second reading; summaries of meetings you missed are the most valuable documents in the platform.
The whole pass should take under fifteen minutes on a normal day. If it consistently takes an hour, the problem is not the pass, it is the volume, and the diagnosis is in the Reports tab under where your work comes from.
Two habits worth forming
Snooze with a reason, not as a reflex. Snoozing until tomorrow is a decision when you know why tomorrow is different: a person is back, a number will exist, a meeting will have happened. It is avoidance when tomorrow simply happens to be later, and the difference is obvious from the inside.
Dismiss more than feels polite. A queue where everything is eventually done is a queue nobody is being honest with. If something was routed to you and did not need you, the useful signal for everybody involved is that you said so. Nobody is offended by a dismissed item; several people are inconvenienced by one that sat untouched for a fortnight.
When the list is genuinely too long
Occasionally the answer is not a better pass. Three things worth trying before assuming the volume is fixed.
Check the kind mix. A list dominated by mentions is a chat problem, not a workload problem, and it is fixed by muting rooms rather than by working faster.
Check the person scope. Items that arrive because you are a fallback approver rather than the right approver should be re-routed at the source.
Check what you are subscribed to. Notification policy decides a good deal of what becomes an item at all, and it is worth one review a quarter.
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