# Your first pass through Needs You

Needs You holds every decision, approval and operational problem waiting on a person, in one place and in rank order rather than by arrival time. Working it is the daily habit that makes everything else safe to leave running. Entries drain by themselves when their cause clears, so an item that vanishes while you were reading it has usually resolved rather than been lost.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **In the app:** #/needs-you, #/approvals, #/autonomy-audit
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/getting-started/read-needs-you/

## What lands in it

- **Held outbound.** A reply, message or call that autonomy says a person must release.
- **Decisions.** Something Connect could act on in more than one defensible way and has chosen not to guess.
- **Operational problems.** A mailbox that has stopped fetching, a suppressed recipient, a spent allowance.
- **Line health.** A phone line that is not ready escalates here by itself, which is why a silent number is noticed by the queue rather than by a customer.

The mixture is deliberate. Splitting approvals from faults produces two queues, one of which is always ignored; a business does not care whether the reason nothing was sent is a policy or a fault, only that something is waiting.

## Why it is ranked, not chronological

An inbox sorted by arrival time tells you what is newest. That is rarely what you want here: a held first reply to somebody who has never heard from you is a different kind of debt from a held message on a thread that has been running comfortably for a week. Rank puts the ones with consequences at the top.

The ordering also draws on the triage a person has already done. Priority is kept on the conversation itself and the engine reads it when it picks work, so raising the priority of a thread is not a private note to yourself — it changes what gets attention. Starring and priority on calls work the same way.

## Working it without dreading it

1. Start at the top and do not sort it by date. The rank is the recommendation; overriding it every day means you are working an inbox again.
2. Read the original above the draft. The most common bad approval is a good answer to a question nobody asked.
3. Decide, then move. An item you cannot decide belongs to somebody who can — hand it over rather than leaving it to age at the top of everyone's queue.
4. When an edit repeats, stop and write it down as a rule or a memory before continuing. Two minutes there removes the next twenty items of the same kind.
5. Finish the operational items even when they are dull. A mailbox that has stopped fetching is quietly costing you every conversation that would have arrived.

> **Note** If the queue is consistently longer than the time you have, the answer is usually an autonomy change rather than more discipline. Narrow scopes exist precisely so that routine, low-risk traffic on one endpoint can run autonomously while the cases that matter still ask.

## What an empty queue proves

| Empty because | How to tell | Whether it is good |
|---|---|---|
| Everything was decided | The decision log shows today's approvals and rejections | Yes — this is the intended state |
| Everything is running autonomously | The channels are on `autonomous` and sends are recorded | Yes, if you meant it |
| Nothing is arriving | The conversation list has not moved either | No — check mailbox health first |
| A channel is on `draft_only` | Drafts exist on conversations but nothing is queued | It is doing exactly what you asked, and nobody is being replied to |

The fourth row is the trap worth remembering. `draft_only` produces an empty queue and a perfectly calm screen while every customer waits, because that mode writes a reply and stops without asking anybody. An empty Needs You is evidence of nothing on its own; it is only good news next to a conversation list that is moving.

## Questions

### An item disappeared before I decided anything. Was it lost?

Almost certainly not. Entries drain by themselves as their cause clears — a line that recovers, an allowance that resets, a thread somebody else handled. The decision log is the place to confirm what happened to it, and it records refusals as well as actions.

### Can two people work the queue at once?

Yes. Approvals are recorded against the person who made them, so a shared queue still produces an unambiguous account of who released what. Agreeing who takes which kind of item is a matter of working practice rather than a setting.

### Is Needs You the same as the approvals screen?

They overlap. Approvals are the subset of the queue that are held outbound actions; Needs You is the whole of it, including operational problems that no approval would ever fix. If you only ever open the narrower screen, faults sit unattended.

## Related

- [What Connect may do](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/)
- [Approve your first reply](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/getting-started/first-approval/)
- [A working day with Connect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/getting-started/daily-routine/)
- [Decide what Connect may do](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/getting-started/set-what-connect-may-do/)
- [Human approval without blocking low-risk work](https://connectbyjbrh.com/research/approval-without-blocking/)
- [Find out why a reply was held](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/how-to/find-why-a-reply-was-held/)

## What this page is based on

- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §5 — Needs You, ranking and line health
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §3 — priority kept on the canonical rows
- Connect capability registry (docs-source/facts.py) — needs_you, audit_trail