What's Holding Up Your Software Project: Unanswered Emails, Tasks With No Progress and Proposals Awaiting an Answer

Most of what slows a project down does not break. It just waits: an email nobody answered, a proposal sent and forgotten, a task nobody touched for two weeks. Here the system goes over the project every night and gathers what is waiting into one list, one row per item, with the reason and how long it has waited.

Ten types, one list

The list tracks ten types of pending items: a proposal with no answer, a proposal about to expire, we wrote and got no reply, they wrote and we did not reply, a task with no update, an overdue task, an unanswered specification question, a deadline mentioned in an email that has passed, a specification request left in draft, and a month waiting for approval. Each row says how long it has been waiting.

Who wrote last

In every email thread the system looks at the last message. If seven days have passed, the thread enters the list: "we wrote, no reply" when the last message is ours, and "they wrote, we did not reply" when it is the client's. This needs a mailbox connected to the project, Gmail or Microsoft 365, where it is known which side of the project the mailbox belongs to. Findings from mail are seen only by the owner of the mailbox, both in the list and in the morning email.

A deadline mentioned in an email

When an email says "by 3/15" or "until 15.3" and the date has passed, the thread enters the list with the quote. The date is found by the keyword before it, in Hebrew, English and Russian, and by the form of the date: day and month, with or without a year. There is no AI and no guessing here: "by Monday" or "by the end of the week" do not count.

Tasks with no progress

An open task with no event for 14 days enters the list as a task with no update. Logging hours does not count as progress: hours get logged on a stuck task too. A task whose due date has passed, by the date in Israel, is listed as overdue starting the day after its due date.

Proposals, specifications and monthly approvals

A proposal sent and left without an answer for 14 days, and a proposal whose validity ends within a week. An open question in a submitted specification request. A specification request left in draft with no edit for a week. And a month submitted and not accepted for a week, on a project where month submission is switched on.

One row per item

When one item has several reasons, for example a proposal with no answer that is also about to expire, it shows as one row: the earliest reason first and the rest as tags. On the project overview and the main dashboard seven rows are shown, and the types take turns so that one type does not fill the whole list. The full list can be filtered by type.

Updated every night

The list is rebuilt every night. An item disappears during the next nightly update once its status changes: a reply came, a status changed, a question was answered. There is no need to mark anything done. If the list is empty, it says that nothing is stuck, and the limits it was built by are written under it.

An email in the morning

In the morning, Israel time, users with email summaries enabled get the list by email: up to seven rows, the number of additional items, and a link. The organization's owner enables the summary for each person separately. It comes in the recipient's language, and when there is nothing to report it is not sent at all. Amounts are shown only to users with permission to view financial amounts, and people on the client's side do not get it.

Frequently asked questions