Notifications

Flightplan tells you when a task becomes yours to do. The bell in the app always tells you. Email and Slack are the two channels that reach you when Flightplan is not open, and you can turn each of them on or off.

The bell

The bell sits at the foot of the sidebar. When a task becomes yours, it is waiting there — named, with the checklist it belongs to and how long ago it opened. Click it and you land on the task.

Opening the bell marks what is in it as read, and the count goes back to nothing. Nothing disappears from the list. A task somebody else closed before you got to it stays where it was and reads Closed, because a notification is the record that you were told, not a to-do list. For that, My work is still the page.

The email

The same news, in your inbox, so you find out about a task without having Flightplan open.

One message covers everything that became yours at the same moment. Starting a checklist that hands you six tasks sends one email listing six tasks, not six emails. Each one links straight to the task.

The email is a copy of the bell, never a replacement for it. Turning it off does not stop the notification, and a message that bounces does not lose one — whatever happens to the mail, the task is in the app.

The Slack message

The same news, as a direct message from the Flightplan app in Slack.

Slack messages are off until you turn them on, unlike the email. An admin can turn them on for the whole workspace, which switches them on for everybody who has not already chosen for themselves.

Two things have to be true before a message can reach you. Somebody has to connect Slack to the workspace, which an admin does once on the connections page. And your Flightplan account has to be matched to your Slack account.

How your Slack account is matched

Flightplan looks for the Slack account with the same email address as your Flightplan account. That is usually the whole story, and Settings shows you the match so you can see which account the messages go to.

If the two addresses are different, no account matches, and Settings asks you to pick yours from a list of everybody in the Slack workspace. What you pick is kept, and Flightplan does not go back to matching by email unless you clear it.

Like the email, one message covers everything that became yours at the same moment, and each task in it links straight to the task.

Who gets told

You are told about a task assigned to you by name, and about a task assigned to a group you are in.

A task that is open to anyone tells nobody. It belongs to everybody, so nobody is told in particular. Those tasks are on My work under Open to anyone.

You are told when the task becomes workable, not when the checklist starts. A task waiting on a prerequisite is nobody's yet, so it reaches you when the prerequisite closes.

Turning a channel off

Open Settings in the sidebar. Each channel has its own switch, and the two are independent — you can keep the email and stop the Slack messages, or the other way around.

For the email there is a second door onto the same setting. Click Stop receiving these at the foot of any of the emails. Your mail app may offer its own Unsubscribe button, which does the same thing.

Your own choice always wins. If an admin turns Slack messages on for the workspace after you have switched yours off, yours stay off.

These settings are per workspace. If you belong to two, you can take the messages from the one you are on call for and not from the other.

Turning a channel off stops that channel and nothing else. The bell keeps working, and every task that would have been sent to you is still there.