Before Thanksgiving: what keeps moving while you're off, and what waits for you

The email that lands Wednesday night

Someone emails at 9:48 on Wednesday night: the hallway light on the second floor is out. You're off until Monday. Who answers it?

Honestly, you do, when you're back. Nothing in RouteWrk answers a new email for you or decides what it is. What changes is where it waits. Your RouteWrk inbox lists the emails you haven't routed yet, in one place, so on Monday the hallway light is in front of you rather than somewhere under four days of mail.

What keeps moving while you're away

The jobs that are already in a workflow don't stop for the weekend. Their steps run on our servers, so your laptop can stay closed:

• Waits run out on time. A step set to wait two days, or until a weekday at 9:00, ends when it says it will.
• Timeouts fire. If you asked a contractor for a quote on Wednesday morning and the workflow waits 48 hours for a reply, the chase goes out on Friday, from your own email address, and every 48 hours after that until the contractor replies.
• The steps after them run. A status change, the next email, the move to the next step.

Every one of those is written in the ticket's history, so on Monday you can see what went out while you were gone.

What waits for you

Some things are meant to need a person, and a long weekend doesn't change that:

• Approvals. A quote waiting at "Owner approves the spend" stays there until you approve or reject it. Nothing gets booked on its own.
• Checklists. A job that stops at "Choose the contractor" stays there until someone ticks it off.
• Replies. When the contractor answers, the reply arrives in your inbox, and RouteWrk suggests which ticket it belongs to. Linking it is your click, and that is what moves the job on.
• New emails. As above: they wait in one list until you route them.

Four things to do before you leave

1. Clear what would sit all weekend. Open each workspace's Kanban board. It shows the jobs waiting on a person, a column for each step: the approvals to give, the checklists to tick. An approval you give on Wednesday afternoon is a job that moves on Thursday instead of the following Monday.

2. Decide what may send on the holiday itself. A step that waits for a reply sends its chase when the timeout runs out, and in the Work Orders template it chases again every 48 hours until someone answers. RouteWrk doesn't know the holiday calendar. If nothing should go out on Thanksgiving Day, put a wait step in front of the chase before you leave, set to a date and time in your organization's timezone (Friday at 9:00, or Monday), and take it out when you're back.

3. Set your own out-of-office in your mailbox, with a way to reach someone for anything urgent. RouteWrk doesn't reply for you, and a burst pipe shouldn't wait until Monday. When you link replies on Monday, an out-of-office is recognized as one: it's kept on the ticket's history and the job keeps waiting for a real answer.

4. Plan Monday morning. Open the inbox first. Route each email that's a job with one click on its workflow, and it starts the same steps as the rest. Answer the ones that aren't with Quick Reply, which sends from your address and archives the email without making a ticket. Link the replies RouteWrk has matched to their tickets.

A month is enough time to try it

Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 26. If you start this week, you have a month to run your real work through one workflow before you rely on it over a long weekend. RouteWrk is free to start, with no credit card: pick a workflow template, connect your email, and route the next job that comes in. The inbox page shows the rest of what the inbox does.