Assigning Messages Using Person Tags

Tip: Some teams take responsibility for a job (such as a voyage, fixture, port calls or shipments) from end-to-end. Other teams share responsibility of jobs, and allocate specific tasks to one another instead. If the latter represents your team, this guide is for you!

1. When you read a message and determine that you need to take action, you should Follow the message. You can do this by clicking the [[Follow]] icon or by hitting [[f]] on your keyboard.

Tip: Following a message adds a blue flag, giving you a quick visual marker that it's something you need to prioritise. You can also filter your view to only see messages you are following, creating a virtual to-do list.

It also gives visibility to the broader team that you are working on something, so they can move on to the next message. Further down the line, if someone has a question about an old message, they will be able to see that you handled it and come to you directly with any questions.

2. If you need to assign a message to another team member, you can click the "Type a comment" field and [[@mention]] them. This will automatically add their follower tag.

3. Click the "Search for a term, tag, Team, or user" field.

4. Any messages you are following are associated with the [[in:Following]] search token. Add this to your search to see a list of messages that you are tagged on.

5. Add the [[in:Inbox]] token to your search to exclude messages that you've archived. Because we archive messages when we've completed them, this ensures your view only includes new, unactioned messages.

Alert: Remember to Save your search before navigating away from this page! You can even make this search Live if you want to be notified that a colleague has assigned a new task to you.

6. Click the "Search for a term, tag, Team, or user" field.

7. Click in the search bar and add the [[has:PersonTag]] token

8. This will show you all messages that have been assigned to a user, regardless of who that user is. If you click on a message you will see which user has been assigned.

Tip: This is a handy search for managers or team leads to save, as it allows you to have a quick view of what the team are working on to manage workloads.

9. Click in the search bar and add the [[not]] and [[has:PersonTag]] tokens

Tip: This is a great search for all team members to have, as it shows all messages which have not yet been assigned. From here you can assign yourself or a team mate so that the message is appropriately handled.

You can even make this search live, so that whenever a new message comes in you will be alerted and can assign it to the right person immediately.