Triaging client requests
Everything a client sends through their portal's "Send a request" form lands in your Requests inbox — one queue, every client, each request waiting on an explicit yes or no. As the page puts it: accept to convert into a task, or decline with a short reply.
Reading the queue
The inbox defaults to Pending — requests nobody has triaged yet. Each row shows the request's title and details, the client (with their color dot), the urgency the client chose, who sent it and when.
Switch the status filter between Pending, Accepted, Declined, and all, and group the list by client (triage one relationship at a time), priority (urgent first), or status.
When the queue is empty you'll see "Inbox zero." — the goal.
Accepting: convert to a task
Click Convert to task and the form opens pre-filled from the request — title, description, and the client's urgency mapped to priority. Adjust before creating:
- Project — where the task lives
- Priority — the client's urgency is their vote, not a commitment; set what's real
- Assignee and due date
- Visibility — defaults to Client-visible, which is usually right: the client asked for this, so let them watch it happen
Click Create task. On the client's side, the request's badge turns green ("Accepted") with a View task link — from here the work proceeds like any other task.
Declining
Click Decline and optionally write a Reply — one or two sentences on why ("out of scope for the current engagement," "covered by the redesign task already in flight"). The client sees the declined badge with your reply on their Requests page.
A short reply is worth writing every time. A bare "Declined" reads cold; a sentence keeps the request channel feeling safe to use.
Triage habits
- Triage daily, even if the answer is no — a pending request is invisible work; clients can see how long it sat
- Don't let the queue become the backlog — accept or decline; "we'll see" lives in your project planning, not in the client's pending list
- Watch the urgency field across requests — a client marking everything urgent is telling you something about the relationship, not the tasks