Problems with personal workflows, notifications, and todos
Requirements for this issue
Identify plan for next steps including a set of issues to execute the plan.
Ensure buy-in from Product and Engineering along the way for the plan.
Final output should include an epic that has been UX-approved, BE-approved, FE-approved.
Original description
Personalization
- Every person has a slightly different workflow. (That's why it's personal!) It's really difficult to prescribe / dictate features in GitLab, because it likely won't work for everyone.
- One person's crucial feature can become another person's friction / pain point.
Reactive / bottoms-up
- Sometimes people follow a bottoms-up approach and are reactive.
- They receive a "ping" (a GitLab email notification, a Slack message, an email.) And they react/respond in that immediate context. They might need to dig further to to see the greater context. But fundamentally, the person is being reactive.
- The person may be parsing through a list of pings from different channels, and address them one by one. Different channels (email/Slack/GitLab) are generating lists of pings, and they address them one by one.
- It's hard to prioritize in this work mode. You don't know if something that demands your attention is important until you dig into it. So you might have "wasted" valuable work time on something you don't value. But you don't know it until you've investigated. It's really hard for GitLab (or any system) to know ahead of time whether something is important to you. The system would have to be really smart, and designing/making that system is very costly and risky.
Proactive / top-down
- Sometimes people follow a top-down approach and are pro-active.
- They have personal priorities. They have a list of GitLab issues that they have saved in a Google doc or bookmarked. They watch the progress of these items tightly because they care about them.
- These personal priorities are often organized manually, often in a hierarchy. There's probably little value for GitLab (or any system) to help you with this aspect, since you will do yourself anyways. And since by definition what is important to you is a small list, it is probably stored in your brain already.
- A person may elect to spend more time on these items because they are precisely more important to them. The risk is that they spend all their time only on these items and ignore other issues that are seeking their attention.
Combination
- Most people work both bottoms-up and top-down. People have different styles. Some people have a zero-inbox psychology and want to clear out the bottoms-up list. Some people may elect to spend at least half of their day on personal priorities before proceeding to look at bottoms-up lists. Some people get obsessed with responding to Slack. Some people purposely turn off Slack to focus.
Too much information, too many channels, and prioritization
- There's too much information to juggle. It's overwhelming.
- There's too many channels. Slack, GitLab, email. It's overwhelming. It's hard to balance.
- It's hard and time-consuming to zero-in and focus on what is important to me if I'm presented with so much information and with so little capability to quickly filter out noise and/or extract important information for me.
- It's hard to prioritize and set expectations with your colleagues.
- From #43474 (comment 60037730): "I used to use them when I first started at Gitlab but they are often duplicated with emails. This goes back to too many channels, I think. It was a waste of time to address everything through email and then have to sift through my todos. One reason may be that todos creates line items that aren't important to me"
- Since everybody does it differently, expectations are hard to balance. I might expect a colleague to respond within 24 hours to an issue ping. But if that colleague has elected not to focus on bottoms-up reactive issues, that might not happen.
GitLab Notifications
- GitLab has a stream email of notifications.
- There is a good level of customization in GitLab for notifications. But we can do more.
- Not everyone uses them.
GitLab Todos
- GitLab has a todos mechanism, that overlaps with notifications.
- There isn't much customization in GitLab for todos. Very little filtering capability.
- Not everyone uses them.
GitLab personal workflows and dashboards
- In GitLab, personal workflows is solved (or attempted to be solved) primarily through notifications and todos.
- There are no other native features that support personal workflow management. There isn't any dashboard view, for example.
Requirements for this issue
Identify plan for next steps including a set of issues to execute the plan.
Ensure buy-in from Product and Engineering along the way for the plan.
Final output should include an epic that has been UX-approved, BE-approved, FE-approved.
Epics that continue this effort
- Introduce notifications and a foundation for both notifications and todos: &222 (closed)
- Filter/search capabilities: &149
- Structure/organisations capabilities: TODO
Edited by Dimitrie Hoekstra