Today

Your home screen: one ranked list of what needs you first, and why an empty list is the goal.

What the worklist is for

The worklist lives at /today and is your authenticated home, the first screen Fay shows when you sign in, and where the logo always returns you. It answers one question, which no list page can: what needs you first?

It is not a dashboard. There are no tiles and no totals. Numbers that describe a season live on the season page; counts of work waiting live as badges in the navigation bar. What is left here is a short, ranked list of things a person is owed, each with the reason attached and one button to act on it.

Nothing on this page is edited in place. Every row is a doorway: it names the work, says why it is surfacing, and hands you to the page where the work actually happens.

The six things it watches

Every row belongs to one of six obligations that every arts organization has, whatever it makes. They describe a relationship, not an art form, which is why the same list serves a chorale, a pottery studio, and a theatre without being configured.

Reciprocity: someone gave; you owe them thanks and a receipt.
Commitment: you said you would follow up, and have not.
Occupancy: a date is coming and the room is not full.
Onboarding: someone new came, and the welcome window is closing.
Attrition: someone who used to come or give has stopped.
Hygiene: Fay is missing data it needs in order to help you.

What can appear

Eight rules, no more. Each is silent unless you keep the data it reads, an organization that never records a capacity never sees a row about an empty room, and one that has never imported an attendee list is never asked for one. Nothing is configured; the list simply watches what you actually keep.

Gifts still unthanked, once the oldest is two days old.
Year-end receipts, in January, February, and March only.
Follow-ups due, today’s as well as the late ones.
An event that is not selling, three to thirty days out.
First-timers nobody has welcomed, from a recent event.
Donors who have lapsed: once the season is far enough along for the comparison to mean something.
The cultivation queue: regulars to invite, donors to win back, memberships ending.
A missing attendee list: for an event that has already happened.

Five of the eight are skipped for a contributor. Four read giving, unthanked gifts, year-end receipts, lapsed donors, and the cultivation queue. The fifth, a missing attendee list, names no donor, but the only thing to do about it is import the list, and importing is not theirs, so the card would be a dead end. Their Today list is the shorter one: follow-ups, events, and first-timers to welcome. It is not a filtered version of yours; those rules simply do not run.

How it decides what comes first

Rows are ordered by what it costs to ignore them, and that cost changes with time. An unthanked gift climbs steadily for a fortnight. A soft night climbs as the date approaches and as the house stays empty. A welcome decays, after a month the moment has passed, and the row bows out rather than linger at nought. A missing spreadsheet never outranks a person who is owed something.

Only seven rows are ever shown, and no single rule may take more than two of them, so a two-hundred-name import cannot bury everything else. Anything beyond seven is counted quietly at the foot of the list.

When it is empty

An empty worklist is the point, not a failure. If Fay has nothing to say, it says so plainly and gets out of your way. A list that is never empty is a list nobody reads, so the rules are deliberately few and deliberately quiet.

Maria’s day

Maria signs in on a Tuesday in October and the logo drops her here. Five rows, no numbers to interpret: Reciprocity two gifts still unthanked, the oldest sixteen days old; Occupancy the spring singalong at thirty-one per cent with nine days to go; Onboarding four first-timers from the harvest concert nobody has written to; Commitment one follow-up due today; and, at the foot, Hygiene a reading with no attendee list.

She does not have to decide what matters. The order already tells her: the sixteen-day-old thank-you is the thing she would be most embarrassed about, so it sits at the top, and one click takes her to the donations list with Thank all 2 waiting. The singalong comes next, and the button beside it hands her the people who come to everything, eleven names worth a personal note.

By the time the coffee has gone cold, four of the five rows are gone and the fifth, the missing spreadsheet, is still politely at the bottom where it belongs. Tomorrow the list will be shorter still, and on a good Thursday it will simply say that nothing needs her.