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Task Actions

A task action is one item on a task’s checklist — a concrete thing someone has to do before the task is finished. A task can have any number of them, and they are worked through in order. Each action carries:
  • a description — what the person is being asked to do, in your words
  • a done state
  • the resource it points at — the form, document, conversation or checklist behind it
Actions are the mechanism a client-facing workflow runs on. An onboarding task might carry three: sign the engagement letter, complete the intake form, upload identification.

The four kinds

Form

The assignee fills out one or more forms.

Document

A document that needs to be read, or signed, or approved.

Chat

The assignee has a conversation with an assistant.

Todo list

The assignee works through a checklist of items.

Adding an action to a task

1

Open the task

Actions live in their own section on the task form, showing the progress across all of them.
2

Choose a kind

Add opens the kind picker — Chat, Form, Document or Todo list.
3

Fill in that kind's panel

Each kind asks for different things. See below.
4

Write the description

Required for every kind. This is the line the recipient reads, so write it as an instruction: “Confirm the supplier contract details”, not “Form”.
5

Add

The action is saved onto the task immediately.
If you are still creating the task, actions you add are held until the task itself is saved, then created against it. Until the task exists they can be inspected and removed, but not completed.

Form

Pick one or more of the Space’s record sets. A blank record is created against each one as soon as the action is added, so the action has something concrete to point at — the recipient fills those records in later rather than a record appearing at fill-in time. Where a record set offers more than one form, you also choose which form to use. Several forms on one action become several steps, completed one at a time in the order you listed them. Each step is stamped complete as it is submitted, so someone who leaves halfway through comes back to the step they stopped at rather than the beginning. The action itself only flips to done once every step is stamped.

Document

Browse the Space’s existing files and pick one, or generate a new document there and then. Two optional requirements can be attached: Without a requirement, the action is completed by the recipient marking the document as read. With one, the action completes only when the signature or approval comes back.

Chat

Pick the assistant the recipient will talk to. You can optionally attach a record flow, which walks them through a form section by section inside the conversation rather than as a plain form. The conversation is created lazily — the session is reserved when you add the action and comes into existence on the recipient’s first message.

Todo list

Type the items, one per row. Blank rows are ignored. The whole checklist lives on the action itself, so no separate entity is created and a half-finished checklist survives the recipient closing the page.

What a recipient sees

Each action appears as a row: an icon, your description, a progress note, and one control. A completed action stays on the task and can still be reopened — a finished form reopens as a read-through rather than an editable form, and a completed checklist can be reviewed but not un-ticked.

Completing a checklist

Ticking items in a todo list saves progress but does not finish the action. Completion is an explicit Submit, so ticking the last box never silently closes the item out from under someone.

Who can complete an action

Only the task’s assignees get the completion control. Everyone else who can see the task still gets a View control to inspect the form, document or checklist, and can remove the action — they simply cannot mark it done on someone else’s behalf.

Progress

The actions section shows a running count of complete against total, and that same figure can be put on the board card as action progress — a count, a percentage, or both. Configure it in Edit Space → Tasks → Board.
Chat actions are not counted. A conversation has no natural moment at which it is finished, so counting one would leave every task permanently short of complete. Chat actions are excluded from the progress figure everywhere it appears.

Actions move the task

Completing a countable action — or adding or removing one — recomputes the task’s status, so a task driven by its checklist keeps up with it without anyone dragging a card. Which status it moves to is resolved through the Space’s own status roles, never a fixed id: The last two rows leave the status alone rather than falling back to the default. Dragging a task that is part-way through — or finished — back to the start of the board would be worse than leaving it where someone put it.
A status the Space does not have is never written. Whichever branch applies, the resolved id is checked against the Space’s own status list first, so a task driven by its actions can only ever land in a column the board actually has.
Set the three roles on Edit Space → Tasks → Statuses, under Say which of these statuses each automated step means. Each is a dropdown over that Space’s own statuses, and each can be left Not set — in which case the fallback in the table above applies. Roles belong to the Space, so two Spaces can name completely different statuses for the same role. See Escalations for why a Space might deliberately name none.

Removing an action

Removing an action asks for confirmation and names the action being removed. If the removal fails, the row stays — an action the recipient is still being asked to complete is never quietly hidden.
A task template can seed a set of actions onto a task as it is created, so a repeated piece of work does not have to be assembled by hand each time.