A customer called Tomek, Tomek messaged Agnieszka on Messenger, Agnieszka emailed the service technician, and the technician wrote it down on a piece of paper in the van. Three days later, nobody knows whether the customer asked for Tuesday or Wednesday. This article explains why decisions get lost even in close-knit teams, how much it costs and how to move to one place without turning the company upside down.
Where decisions really get lost
Take any matter from last week and trace how many channels it passed through. It usually looks like this: the first conversation with the customer took place over the phone, the confirmation was sent by email, a colleague was asked a question on WhatsApp, the quote is on a shared drive, and someone mentioned the changed due date in a meeting. Five places, one matter, no complete picture.
None of these channels is bad: phone calls are quick, emails leave a record, and instant messaging is convenient. The problem is that none of them knows the others exist. When you ask a week later, “Where did we leave things?”, the answer has to be pieced together from four people's memories and three applications.
Consider an example based on several such companies - let us call it Termoserwis: a company of eight that services air-conditioning systems and heat pumps. There is the owner, Marek, two office staff (Agnieszka and Kasia), a salesperson, Tomek, and four service technicians. For one week, Agnieszka noted every question such as “Where is it?” or “What did we agree with...?”. There were 31 questions. Three of them ended with an apology to the customer because the service technician arrived on a different day from the one the customer remembered.
The cost of searching and switching
Gloria Mark's team at the University of California, Irvine observed 24 office workers minute by minute over several days. The 2005 results showed that they spent an average of 11 minutes on one matter before switching to another or being interrupted. 57 per cent of matters were interrupted, and those who returned to an interrupted matter on the same day did so after an average of 25 minutes and more than two other matters in between.
In a 2008 experiment, the same team examined what happens when people are interrupted while replying to emails. They completed the task even faster and without any loss of quality, but at the cost of significantly higher stress, frustration, effort and time pressure. The team makes up for it by working faster, but pays for it in wellbeing.
The McKinsey Global Institute also estimated the scale of the problem in its 2012 report “The social economy”: office workers spend around 28 per cent of their week handling emails and 19 per cent searching for information or the people who have it. In its 2023 Work Trend Index, based on 31 thousand people across 31 countries, Microsoft reported that 62 per cent of respondents complained about spending too much time searching for information.
Different years and methods, the same conclusion: scattered communication consumes hours that never appear on an invoice.
The single-place principle
The principle is simple: every matter has one thread, and everything related to it goes into that thread. Not “into one tool” - into one thread. This is an important distinction. You can have a single tool and still lose track of decisions if the discussion about the service job at Nowak's takes place in three different chats.
A thread for a matter should meet four conditions:
- It has a name and assignees. Everyone on the team knows where to find the Nowak matter and who is responsible for it.
- The conversation stays with the matter. The question, answer, due date change and “OK, we'll do it” all appear in one sequence, in order.
- Changes are recorded automatically. Finding out who changed the due date and what the previous date was should not depend on someone's memory.
- It can still be found a month later. With a single word in Search, rather than by scrolling through a chat.
In Task Manager, this thread is a task: a subject, description, due date, assignees and the full conversation underneath. System entries record changes to the status, due date (including the previous value), priority and assignees. When Marek moves the service job from Tuesday to Thursday, a dated entry appears in the thread - without him having to write “just so you know, I've moved it”. See the Tasks feature description for details.
Where decisions get lost and where they should go
This table is ready-made material for a team meeting. It is not about banning phone calls - it is about what happens after the call.
| Where the decision gets lost | Why it gets lost | Where it should go |
|---|---|---|
| A call from a client | It stays in one person's head | Two sentences in the task thread straight after the call |
| An email to one person | The rest of the team cannot see it | The email linked to the task in Mail, with the key points copied into the thread |
| Messenger / WhatsApp | It gets mixed up with personal conversations, while the thread for one matter becomes scattered across several chats | A Workspace chat or task thread |
| The file “wycena_final_v3.xlsx” on a drive | Nobody knows which version is current | One current attachment in the task thread |
| A decision made during a meeting | Everyone remembers it differently | A note shared with the team, with decisions transferred to tasks |
| A bug description saying “it's in the top-right corner, the blue one” | Five sentences instead of one image | A screenshot annotated with Draw in the thread |
| An “on-the-fly” due date change | There is no record of who changed it or when | The due date is changed in the task and a system entry is created automatically |
Five rules to agree in a single meeting
The single-place principle only works if the entire team follows the same rules. Marek and his team agreed on the five rules below during a single half-hour meeting. They were not perfect, but everyone followed them.
- Every client matter is a task. There is no service job, quote or complaint without a task. The first person to learn about the matter creates it.
- After a call, write two sentences in the thread. Who called, what you agreed and what happens next. It takes 30 seconds and saves an hour of searching.
- An email about a matter is linked to the task. If an email relates to a matter, link it to the task and copy what the team needs to know into the thread.
- Give decisions a star. Mark the message containing the final decision as a favourite, so that nobody has to search through 80 entries a month later.
- Do not ask “where is it?” - search for it. Before asking a colleague, enter a word in Search. If you cannot find it, that is a sign the decision was not added to the thread, and you raise the issue.
Two weeks later, Agnieszka repeated her count. In our example, the number of “where is it?” questions fell from 31 to 9. Not zero - some people still called instead of writing - but the three apologies to clients dropped to zero.
How Task Manager helps you follow the principle
Software cannot force a team to be disciplined, but it can make using one place more convenient than using five.
Email alongside the task, not instead of it
Email is the biggest gap in most teams. A client writes to one person, while everyone else sees only the consequences. This is what happens with the email in the opening image: Delta Meble writes to Ola about a cracked worktop from order 4821 and asks for a replacement or refund. If it remains only in Ola's inbox, the rest of the team will not learn about the complaint until the client calls. In Mail, you connect your own IMAP/SMTP mailbox and read emails in the same window as your tasks. The email thread menu includes the Link option - select a Workspace, then a task or chat. From then on, the task header displays a badge with an envelope icon and the email subject; clicking it opens the correspondence in Mail.
To be clear: linking is a navigation shortcut, not a way to share an email. The mailbox remains private, even an administrator cannot see someone else's mail, and only its owner sees the badge. The rest of the team receives the key points from the email pasted into the thread or attachments saved in Files. Like Files and Automations, Mail is included in the Pro plan in Pricing.
An annotated screenshot instead of five sentences
Paweł, the service technician, used to take a photo of the controller and write: “the error on the left, below the second button, not the red one”. Now he opens the image in the message, selects Draw on image, circles the right place and inserts it as a reply. The Draw feature also works from scratch: a freehand drawing can be inserted into a message and saved in the Files for that thread. One image with a circle replaces a paragraph of explanation and two follow-up questions.
A meeting note that does not get lost on the drive
Kasia writes up the decisions from Monday's meeting in Notes and shares them with the team, either as view-only or with editing rights. A note remains private until you share it - assigning it to a Workspace only adds a label. Decisions that require action still become tasks; the note provides context, not a task list.
Search instead of asking
The Search under the magnifying glass icon above the list searches tasks (subject and description), chat names and the content of messages in tasks and chats across the Workspaces you can access, and displays an excerpt with the matching word highlighted. In the screenshot below, the word “client” returns three tasks from three different Workspaces and one chat - without opening any of them. Marek enters “Swarzędz” and sees every item related to that address, along with messages that mention the name. There are also filters above the list: status, priority, due date, favourites and type - including “Today” and “Overdue” tiles that also serve as counters.
One place for everything that has happened
If everything is kept in threads, someone needs to tell you which thread has changed. The Notification Centre does this: a small Island at the edge of the screen with a counter and categories for mail, tasks, conversations, mentions, calendar and shared items. Opening a thread clears its notifications from the Island, so the counter shows what is genuinely waiting for you. A @Paweł mention goes into a separate category for Paweł, so he does not have to read everything.
What not to do in the first week
The most common mistake is moving everything at once: three years of emails, every file and every conversation. The team will get bogged down in organising instead of working. Instead:
- Start with open items. Anything currently in progress gets a task. Old, closed items stay where they are.
- One Workspace per team, not per client. Two or three are enough for a company of eight people (for example, Service, Sales and Office). A client is a task, not a Workspace.
- Review the rules after two weeks. Count the “where is it?” questions before and after. A number, not an impression, will convince the sceptics.
If your company currently uses five communication tools, also read about using one program instead of five - the same principle from the perspective of tools rather than habits.
What next
Decisions do not get lost because of a lack of discipline. They get lost because each channel is convenient in the moment, but none of them retains the full picture. One place for each item, five rules and two weeks of consistency are enough to stop “where did we leave this?” from opening half of the conversations in your company. If you want to see how a task thread with a linked email and Search works in practice, view the Demo.
Frequently asked questions
Does the one-place rule mean no emails or phone calls?
No. Customers will still call and send emails. The rule applies to what happens next: the key points from the conversation go into the relevant task thread, and the email is linked to the task. The incoming channel remains, but there is only one place where decisions are stored.
Does linking an email to a task show its content to the whole team?
No. Mail in Task Manager is private, and the link is a navigation shortcut for the mailbox owner. If the team needs to know the content, copy the relevant part into the thread or save the attachments in Files.
How long does it take to introduce the rule in a small team?
A meeting to agree the rules takes half an hour, while creating tasks for open matters in a company of eight takes one afternoon. It takes two or three weeks to establish the habit of writing two sentences after a phone call - that is the longest part.
What about decisions made before implementation that are stored in emails and chats?
Leave them where they are. For each matter that is still open, add a brief “current status” update with the date to the task thread - three or four sentences. You do not need to recreate the history; a starting point is enough.
Does Task Manager need AI for this to work?
No. Threads, Mail, Notes, Draw, Search and Notification Centre work without a connected model. AI using the customer's own key is an optional extra, for example for summarising a long thread, not a requirement.
Sources
- Gloria Mark, Victor M. González, Justin Harris, “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work”, CHI 2005
- Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, Ulrich Klocke, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress”, CHI 2008
- McKinsey Global Institute, “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies”, July 2012
- Microsoft, “Work Trend Index Annual Report: Will AI Fix Work?”, 9 May 2023
The Task Manager Team - we write about teamwork, AI in business and keeping tasks organised, using examples from Task Manager, software installed on your own server. Task Manager has been developed by Blue Creation Group (Piotr Łącz) since 2013 and is used by organisations including Neonet, the Military University of Technology and Polpharma - read customer reviews. We check our articles against the user guide and the latest version of the software.
