Frequently Asked Questions

How to Start Using Actioned

Congratulations, you’ve created an account! Now what though??? 🤔

Start with Actions

The whole premise behind Actioned, is to help you take action on the things that are important. Which is why we’ve made the opening view your actions.

  • Enter a few things you want to get done for today and the next few days
  • Each item should be fairly small – you should expect to be able to do it in an hour or less. (“New website” is not a good example, but “Find 3 website designers” works well.)
  • Drag and drop them to put them in the order you intend to do them.
  • Then, get into the habit of just starting with your first action and doing that until it’s done. Then take a break before starting the next action on your list.
  • As you get things done, mark them off in Actioned (just tick the circle next to the action).
  • You’ll notice that Actioned tracks how many Actions you’ve done for the week.
  • Get into the habit of actually doing everything on your list! It’s a great feeling!

Actions

Setup Workspaces

If you work with teams or want to separate different parts of your life, you should use Workspaces to achieve this.

  • Add a new Workspace and give it a name that is meaningful to you.
    • For a work team, this could be; the Business name, Department name, or Team name
    • If it’s just for separating your roles in life, it might be; Health, Family, Secret Project, Side Hustle, Hobby Name, etc
  • Choose a color to represent your workspace
  • Invite anyone else you’d like to have access to that workspace. If you don’t invite anyone else, it remains just for you (and no-one else can see it). If you invite team members, they’ll be able to see you actions, tasks and goals – but only the ones that relate to that workspace.
  • Then, when you add new actions, you can choose whether they’re “Personal” or for one of you workspaces

Use the Task List

The task list is like your master to-do list.

  • Put everything here that you think you want to do at some stage. Empty your head out here – it feels good!
  • Think about your priorities and change the timing of tasks by dragging them between the Now, Next, Someday and Backburner timings
  • For each task, you can add a description, assign team members, group them together in Projects, and add Actions.
  • You can also link an existing Action to a Task

Team Tasks

Get Clear on Your Goals

Goals are the reason for doing everything so it pays to force yourself to get very clear on your goals.

  • For each of your Workspaces (including your Personal one), think of a goal that you’re aiming towards
  • Ideally, each goal should be SMART – specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-framed
  • Goals are not structurally linked to Tasks or Actions but you should review them frequently and keep them in mind as you’re adding Tasks and Actions

Goals

Click here for more details about how to use actions, tasks and goals together.

How to setup different Workspaces (or Teams)

With Actioned, you can separate different parts of your work and life using “workspaces”. By default, everyone has a “personal workspace” and in addition to this you might have a separate one of “work”, or separate ones for each of your teams. Or, you might like to have separate ones for each major project you’re working on, or even one for different roles you play in life.

The reason to separate things is that you can then view them separately. And importantly, you can set different colors for each workspace – which gives you a nice visual way to see where you’re spending your time and energy.

Another reason to use separate workspaces is that you can invite colleagues or team members to join you in a workspace. That way you can all work together, whilst also keeping your personal things separate.

To set up a workspace;

  1. In the left menu, you’ll see a “+ New Workspace” link – click on that
    nw workspace
  2. Then you’ll be asked to name your Workspace and choose a color. (These can both be changed later if you change your mind.)
    Add workspace
  3. Then you’ll be asked whether you want to invite other people to join this workspace. You can always do this later as well. Either choose “Skip this” or enter the name and email address of someone you’re working with and click “Send Invitation”
    invite others to join workspace
  4. If you’ve invited someone to join your workspace, they’ll be sent an email straight away. If they are new to Actioned, they’ll be invited to join, and if they’re already using Actioned, they just need to click so that the workspace you created is added to their profile.
  5. You’ll then see your new workspace in the left menu here 🙂
    New workspace

Also see > How to Manage Workspaces (including inviting team members)

How to Manage Workspaces (including inviting team members)

If you want to make changes to one of your workspaces, this is easy to achieve.

  1. Go to the Workspace in the left menu (you’ll then be viewing the Actions for that workspace). Then click on “Workspace Setup” in the top right.
    Access workspace setup
  2. From here you can make all the changes you want. Workspace setupFor instance, you can;
    • Change the name of your workspace
    • Change the color identifier used for your workspace
    • Deactivate your workspace (if you no longer want to use it)
    • Set team members to be Managers (this gives them the ability to add actions for other team members, and to invite other team members)
    • Invite more team members to join your workspace
    • And, you can remove team members from the workspace (just click the “x” next to their name)
  3. Remember to click Save before you leave this page

Also see > How to How to setup different Workspaces (or Teams)

Who can see my Personal Actions, Tasks and Goals?

Many people start using Actioned in a work setting – but Actioned can also be used to help you be more organized in your personal life too.

By default, everyone has a “Personal” Workspace. You can have Personal Actions, Tasks and Goals.

Please rest assured that NO-ONE else can see your Personal Actions, Tasks or Goals. They are for your eyes only.

The only information shared is the actions, tasks and goals for a workspace where you have team members. So if you have other Workspaces which do not have any team members, these are also private to only you. (Some people like to setup workspaces for different areas of their lives – eg Health, Family, Side Hustle, Secret Project, etc.)

The image below shows Personal Actions (in blue) mixed with some work actions for the ACME Pty Ltd workspace (in yellow).

Personal Actions

Team members that share the ACME workspace would be able to see the yellow actions, but not the blue actions. This is what they see when viewing the ACME Pty Ltd Actions.

team members cannot see personal actions

So feel free to use Actioned to plan your personal and work actions – after all, the lines are blurry these days. Most of us do some work during personal time, and some personal actions during work time.

How do the Email Updates work?

Each day, everyone receives an email with a summary of the progress for themselves and their workspaces.

When are the Daily Emails sent?

These emails are sent at approximately 8:00 am each weekday (Monday-Friday) in each user’s local time zone.

What’s in the Daily Emails?

The emails contain;

  • A personal summary;
    • Actions you accomplished yesterday*
    • Actions you have planned or outstanding for today
  • For each workspace, the email also shows;
    • The actions accomplished yesterday* – listed by each team member
    • The actions planned for today – listed by each team member

*They actually include all actions accomplished since the last email was sent – including any you might do early in the morning. The emails sent on Mondays, include all the actions accomplished on Friday or on the weekend.

How do Daily Emails Help?

The idea of these emails is to;

  • Make you feel good about the progress you’re making and the actions you’ve completed
  • Prompt you to stay focused on the actions you have planned for the day (or to plan them if you haven’t yet!)
  • Show you what your team members have accomplished – so that you can give them a pat on the back
  • Show you what your team members will be working on today – so that you can have more useful conversations about the work that’s happening

Can I Unsubscribe?

Of course, you can unsubscribe to the Update Emails at any time.

Or, you can remove certain workspaces so that they are not included in your emails.

Click here for details on how to unsubscribe or choose which workspaces to include in your emails.

How to change your email preferences

By default, you’ll receive an Update email from Actioned each weekday. This probably sounds like a lot but if you’re trying to keep on top of a busy team and keep everyone focused on making progress each day, this information is extremely useful.

The email will have ALL of YOUR actions, and the actions for each of your team members in your workspaces (only the actions that relate to those workspaces though).

But if you’d prefer to change your email preferences, here’s how you do it;

  1. Go to your Account Settings by clicking the arrow next to your name and photo in the very top right of the screen.
    My Account
  2. Then you’ll see your options for “Email Updates”.
    change email settings
  3. If you want to turn the emails off altogether, uncheck “Receive daily update emails”
  4. If you want to exclude one or more of your workspaces, just uncheck the name for that workspace.
  5. Then click “Close” and you’re done.
How to create a desktop shortcut on your phone for Actioned

I know, I know, you’d like Actioned to be an actual app that you can download from the App Store. We will get to that but it’s going to take some time as these kinds of apps need to be totally created from scratch. (Unfortunately it’s not a matter of just saving our existing web app as an iOS or Android app!) I’m sorry about this and thank you for being patient!

In the meantime though, one workaround is to create a shortcut to Actioned which you can have on your phone’s Home Screen. How do you do this?

For iPhones…

  1. Open your web browser on your phone (eg Safari, Chrome, etc)
  2. Navigate to the Actioned app – app.actioned.com – log in if you’re not already logged in
  3. Then click on the symbol at the bottom of the screen that looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it
    Actioned on iphone
  4. Then you’ll see some options like these. Scroll to the right…
  5. Until you see the “Add to Home Screen” button. Click on that and you’ll then be asked if you want to choose a nam for your shortcut. Then you’re done. You now have an easy way to access Actioned from your iPhone!

For Android Phones…

  1. Open your web browser on your phone (eg Chrome)
  2. Navigate to the Actioned app – app.actioned.com – log in if you’re not already logged in
  3. Tap the Menu Button (the 3 vertical dots in the top right of the screen)
  4. Tap “Add to HomeScreen”
  5. You’ll be asked to choose a name, and then you’re done!
How to add a profile picture

To add a profile picture, click in the top right area to access your profile.

Access profile

Then select “My Profile”.

Click My Profile

The My Profile panel will now be open.

From here, click on the camera icon on the default image.

Click camera icon

Then select a photo or image file from your computer. This will then upload (there might be a short delay).

uploading profile image

You can then click Save Changes and your profile image will be uploaded.

This is especially important if you work with other people as your profile image easily lets people see who is doing what.

Team productivity tool

How to create Recurring Actions

Recurring actions are great for those things that you want to remember to do on a regular basis.

Want to send your invoices each Friday? Want to post on social media each day? Want to take a walk each evening? Prepare for a meeting each month? Use recurring actions.

  1. To create a recurring action, you can’t use the quick, inline way to add actions, you need to click on these 3 dots and open the New Action popup.
    Add new action popup
  2. Then you simply add the description of your action and choose a recurring frequency. You can choose from; every day, every weekday (or weekend), every week on this day of the week, or every month on this date. If you need something to recur say twice a week, just add it in weekly on both days that you’d like it to recur.
    create a recurring action
  3. Click “Add Action” and you’re done.

Note that recurring actions *will not* appear as outstanding if you don’t do them on the day you set. (We don’t want you ending up with 17 outstanding actions telling you to “go for a run”!

How to deactivate a workspace (and reactivate)

If you no longer need to use a particular workspace, you can deactivate by going to Workplace Settings.

First click on the Workplace name in the left menu, then you’ll see the Workspace Settings option in the top right. (You will only see this option if you are a manager of that workspace. Otherwise you’ll need to request to be added as a manager or for them to do this.)

workplace settings

From here, just click to deactivate the workspace. You’ll be asked to confirm this.

Deactivate workspace

Once you’ve deactivated a workspace, it will no longer show in your left menu and will not be included in the emails you receive. This workspace will now be deactivated for ALL team members.

workspace gone

If you need to reactivate this workspace in the future, you can find it under your Account settings.

navigate to account settings

From here, you’ll see your Deactivated Workspaces (if you have any).

deactivated workspaces

Just click on this to reactivate the workspace. You’ll then be asked for confirmation and your workspace will be reinstated.

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