[54] – Autotask Work Lists

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts, Rayanne Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. Hey, Rayanne, how are you doing?

I am doing great, Chris. How are you? I'm very well. Thank you. It's starting to get winter here in the UK, so a little bit cold, but otherwise things are going really well for me.

How about you? Well, it's a beautiful day here in sunny Florida. Temperatures are beginning to dip, but, you know, for us, dip means into the fifties. And of course, we're Fahrenheit, not centigrade. And so it's a little chilly for us, but I'm sure that you're probably used to that all year round because you are way high up there on the latitude scale.

Absolutely. Yeah. Chilly for you is like the middle of summer for us. Yeah, exactly. We, while we do get warm here, but think, you know, the temperatures you're talking about is like, we'd be shorts and t-shirts and, you know, going to the beach and surfing and stuff like that.

So I don't have, I don't have any, well, I'm, I'm very envious. So I don't have any sympathy or for you being hot or being not as cold as, as I am. So anyway, Rayanne, what are we going to talk about today? Well, I wanted to bring up a topic and, you know, I get this question an awful lot about what's the best way to perhaps multitask or add, you know, time onto multiple tickets at the same time, or even what is the best way to organize your workflow for the day? You know, so I thought that we could talk about the work list.

Okay, good. And I'm so glad we're talking about that. Of course, you know what I'm about to say, and I think our listeners probably by now are sick of me saying it, but it's one of my favorite things to talk about and ask. Is it really? I had no idea.

It sure is. So yeah, I mean, and ticket work lists, you actually said something really cool there about how to organize your work and how to organize your tickets. And I think that's what the ticket, you know, work list allows you to do is to kind of work on multiple tickets and have multiple time entries running in an organized fashion. Right. So you can kind of see all the timers, you can move them around, you can decide like, you know, which ones you want to do first.

So, you know, maybe the ones that are a higher priority move to the top, you know, and so you can just organize your list in terms of how you want to work on it and have all those timers running at the same time. Or not. Or not. Yeah, exactly. Or you can have, well, multiple of them running or one running at a time, whatever the case might be, but it keeps them down the right-hand side of the screen and, you know, just allows you to very quickly flick between the time entries.

So what's your experience with it? And I know you said you've got a few clients that have asked the questions on that. So I'm interested in your kind of take on it as well. So one thing that we do here is at the beginning of the day, you know what you need to work on. Maybe you do, maybe you don't because the tickets may come in throughout the day, but when you come in and you start your day and you start planning the things that you're going to work on, pick up that ticket and stick it in the work list.

Right? So here's a perfect example. Once a month I visit with a client and they have six or seven different entities, depending on the month that I'm there. So when I get there, I open up a ticket for each one of those entities and I hit the start and stop button for each one of them. As I, you know, if I'm working on entity one, hit the start.

And then I finished that up. I hit the stop and then entity number two. Now, if I have to go back to entity one, I can just hit the start button again and it will continue capturing my time. Right? So that's one way that we use it.

Internally here in our office, you might pick up five or six tickets, you know, and here's the cool thing about that is that if you're at the beginning of the day and you say, I want to accomplish these six or seven things, and you've got those tickets in your work list. And as you start to tick them off and close out those tickets out of your work list, you can literally see your day coming to an end, you know, and there's light at the end of the tunnel. Right? You know, how do you use it? Yeah.

And actually that's a brilliant way to use it. And I do a very, very similar thing. So, you know, like yourself, I, you know, I work with multiple customers during the day. So I'll have, you know, consulting customers who have either bought some blocks of time or I'll have some customers that are on, you know, some kind of monthly, but whatever it is, I'm doing sessions throughout the day. So I've, you know, I'm doing an hour here and an hour there.

So what I do at the beginning of each day, I actually add all of the time entries, all the tickets into my, my work list. So what I then do is I say, during the day, I know that these are the five or six tickets that I need to be working on. And then what I do is obviously when I'm working with one particular customer, I just start the timer, do the work. And then I click the little blue button, add the time and close the ticket down. And then that timer has gone.

So that's one of the ways I do it is I kind of put everything that I need to work on during the course of that day. I will actually put into my ticket work list so that I'm not having to go and hunt for the ticket or find the ticket or whatever the case might be. Right. So one of the primary complaints I get from clients that they have trouble getting their texts to enter the time in, and they might wait until the end of the day and then grab the tickets and, you know, guesstimate their time onto the ticket, then close the ticket. There's a couple of things wrong with that.

One, you're not really capturing the actual time. Two, you might be killing your SLA metrics simply because the ticket is gone unresolved for X amount of hours. Right. So, but the ongoing complaint is they don't want to start and stop and open up these tickets or whatever. Great.

I get that. But the work list, you know, is a terrific solution to that problem. Just like you were saying, you can start and stop the timers as you go. And once you're done, you hit the little blue record button, the ticket pops out into a new window, put in your summary notes, and you can close the ticket and off you go. You know, it's just I find that it's a lot more convenient to do it that way.

And usually when I illustrate this to clients, most of the time they didn't even know that it was there. So, for our listeners, Chris, you know, where can they find this work list and how can they get tickets into it? Absolutely. So, from the older task screen, anyone who's looking at it, right on the very far right-hand side, there's two little tabs. You know, one's got a little sort of paperclip thing and another one looks like a sheet of paper actually.

And the other one's a clipboard. And those are your ticket list and your task list as well. So, you've got your ticket work list and your task work list. And when you click on the little tabs, it kind of shoots out to the left and that's where you'll be able to add your tickets. Now, one of the actual really nice things I love about my ticket work list is that, and the other reason I use it for clients as well, is I don't always have the actual Autotask user interface open all the time.

So, what I do is I put all of the tickets into the work list and then there's a little option that says open in new window. And when you open a new window, if you're like me and you've got a million screens, you've got one screen that at least you can move the stuff to. So, I just move it onto a second screen and then I can minimize my browser. I don't need to have Autotask, you know, necessarily open in front of me and I can still see the timers and all of that kind of stuff. So, it's just on the right-hand side.

And when you first go into it, if you haven't got any tickets in there, obviously that list is going to be blank. So, the way to add the tickets in there, there's actually a couple of ways you can do it. So, the first way is you can click the little burger menu next to your menu next to any ticket that you like. And then in the middle under the ticket actions, there's an option that says add this to my work list or you can actually add it to somebody else's work list as well. So, you can take a ticket and just chuck it into the work list.

And what it effectively does, it doesn't add the whole ticket in there. It really just adds the timer for that ticket into that work list and allows you to add your time from there. So, hang on, hang on just one second. You know, and this is perhaps another way that people can use it, right? So, you've got a service coordinator who is in charge of creating the tickets and then even assigning those tickets.

So, not only can you add that ticket to a queue or notify the technician that this ticket has been assigned to them, but you could stick it directly into their work list. And so, they're going to see that number in the right-hand side where that tab is, you know, go from zero to one, right? And that's the other thing I wanted to point out is that you can see how many tickets are in your work list without ever actually opening the work list. So, if you look in the upper right-hand corner and you see the little black tab, mine's black, I don't know what color yours is, but you see the little tab and the clipboard, which is your tasks, and the other one for your tickets, there's going to be a number in there. Right now, it might show zero.

It might show 10 if somebody has been adding things to your work list that you weren't aware of, right? But that's how you can see them. So, interesting. Continue on. And actually, you were just saying about somebody manually adding it.

So, your dispatcher or, you know, whatever is going to add it to your work list. The other way you can actually do that is with a workflow rule. So, you could actually say with a workflow rule that when a ticket is assigned to a primary resource, then automatically add it to their work list. So, that's actually the way I have mine set up, even though I'm the only resource in my audit task. But, you know, when I have a ticket that's assigned to me, I just have it automatically going in and adding it to my work list.

And it's the way I work with a lot of my clients now is to say, don't worry necessarily about somebody having to manually go and put it into the work list. Just have a workflow rule that does it for you because that way you know that it's going to go into their work list and it's going to go into the right work list as well because it goes into whoever the primary resource is. So, that's the, those are a couple of ways to do it. Of course, the other way is you could basically use the, I think it works on the forward modify as well. Yeah, it does.

So, you can, from the forward modify, there's an option underneath the option for primary resource. It actually says add to primary resources work list as well. So, you could kind of assign a whole bunch of tickets in one go to somebody and then go ahead and add it to their work list so that they can see it from there as well. And when you're doing the forward modify actually, there's two options. There's a remove from old primary resources work list.

So, if you're doing the forward modify and the ticket was assigned to Rayanne and then I now go and assign that ticket to Chris, it will remove it from your work list and assign it into my work list as well. I use that all the time as part of our workflow, right? When, if I'm doing something and then it's time for me to hand it off to the next person in line, I'll take it off of my work list and add it to the other person's work list, you know. And again, I have that feeling of accomplishment. Woo-hoo, I got one down, right?

So, it should be noted that, you know, you can not only put tickets in there but also project tasks, you know. So, that's what the clipboard is for. The clipboard is going to show you how many tasks are in your work list and then the number of tickets that are in your work list. So, this is not just for help desks, it's also for projects and tasks. That's correct, yeah.

And it's the same principle with tasks as well. So, you just click the little burger menu next to the task inside a project and you can say add to my work list or what have you. And then you know that as an engineer, those are all of the tasks that you have available to work on. And of course, if you're doing both, if you're doing tickets and tasks, you know, maybe you're sharing half your time between projects and service desk, you can have both in there, right? So, you can have a lot of project tasks and you just flick between the two little tabs and, you know, and add your time accordingly.

So, I have a question though and I don't have AutoTask open in front of me so I can't test this while we're… So, I'm just going to throw it out there and let you answer it. Okay. So, you have the ticket in your work list and you're working on it, right? And you click the start timer, you click the stop timer, record the time. And sometimes that makes… Well, if you mark the ticket as complete, I think it takes it off of your work list.

But there have been times where I would record time and still see the ticket in my work list. So, what are some of the ways that you can get the tickets off of your work list aside from just clicking that X button? Because as soon as you click that X button, it's going and so is the time that you put into it as well, you know, if you don't hit that record button. And that's a great question. And actually, I came across that a few months back where, yeah, the tickets were being closed and they were not being removed from the work list.

And what it really is, is it's only tickets that you close manually by changing the status. If you close a ticket via a workflow, then it does not remove it from your work list. So, if you're ever seeing that, if you're using the work list and you're seeing tickets that are still in there and they've been marked as complete, it's probably because you have a workflow rule that's completing the tickets and therefore they do not remove it. You know, you have to go in and change the status yourself. So, click it from whatever it is to complete and then it will remove it from your work list.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I guess it's because the idea of it, and this is just me speculating, you know, with how it works, is that, you know, the work list is very much your thing as a human, as a techie. So, it needs you to actually close the ticket to say, I no longer want it on my work list.

You know, it's not up to a workflow rule to go, hey, it's now completed. You don't get to keep it in your work list anymore. So, you know, so I think they kind of done that that says, when you close it yourself, it removes it. But when you close it from a workflow rule, it does not. The other thing you can do is you can have it that when a ticket gets pushed into your work list, that it can go in actually with the timer paused or stopped so that the time doesn't just start ticking as soon as it hits your work list.

And then you manually click on the start button to actually start that time. Or you can have it that just says, you know, when you click on it, it says automatically start stopwatch when a ticket or time entry is opened from my work list. So as soon as it goes in, the timer starts. And as soon as you then open the ticket from the work list as well, the timer is ticking at the same time. Well, you learn something new every day because I've never seen that timer automatically start.

I just assume they always went in with the timer stopped, but you're saying it's possible to, okay, I'm going to start working on this ticket right now, add it to my work list and start the timer. Correct. So inside the ticket work list, there's a little cog button, which you will see. And there's two options in there that says keep stopwatch running when it's added to my work list. And then the other one says automatically start something like automatically start the stopwatch when the ticket is open.

So you can select those two options and then it'll automatically start. I have mine turned off though, to be fair, because like you said, what I do is I come in and by the first thing in the morning or the day before, I will know what I'm going to be doing for tomorrow. So I will then at the end of my day, I'll just go, okay, add all of these into my work list. But I don't want the timer to start at that point because I want the timer to start when I click the button, when I actually start logging the time for the customer. So it's up to you how you do it.

I mean, even if the timer does start, to be honest with you, just like anything else in Autotask with any of the other timers, you can just click the X button next to the timer and stop that anyway. But I figured if it allows you to bring the timer in to the work list with the time stopped, then you might as well do that and stop them manually when you need them. So. Yeah, I think that I would prefer to have more control over the start and stop. However, those techs out there that complain about having to start and stop, perhaps they would like to have it, you know, automatically run, you know, like, hey, okay, I'm going to get myself these three tickets and I'm going to run this back up and, you know, that network security test and this penetration test over here.

And I'm going to do them all at the same time, start the timer, and then at least they'll have the time captured. Of course, they have to stop the timer themselves when they're done working on the ticket and put in their notes. There's still no way around that. But, you know, it's a good solution, I think, for the techs that, you know, really struggle with finding the ticket, opening the ticket, minimizing the ticket with the timer started, and then coming back, stopping the timer, entering the notes, you know, and so on and so forth. And I might just add that entering the time entries is probably a really good opportunity to use the speed code for those time entries if they really dislike doing that as well.

And actually, yeah, you said something about, you know, opening up the tickets and closing them and opening them. One of the really nice things about the work list as well is when the ticket is actually inside the work list, there's a little arrow that's kind of pointing diagonally upwards. If you click on that arrow, it actually opens up the ticket detail screen. So now you can actually view the entire ticket. And then if you look at the ticket right in the very top left corner of the ticket, there's an arrow facing downwards, which will push it back into your work list.

I do that a lot. If I need to look back at the note of what I discussed with a client previously, I can kind of look back at the notes and go, okay, this is what I did. And I click the little button, push it back into my work list. And then I start the timer and that then I don't need the ticket anymore. And then all I need to do is click the little blue record button and record my time.

So yeah, I love it. I think it really makes my day so much quicker and easier without me having to open up a ticket, close a ticket, or minimize the screen. Open up the time entry, minimize the time entry. And we all know with Autotask, you know, how many other tabs or windows it opens every single time you do that. So this is a really good way to kind of just keep them all there, you know, and when you need them, just click on the timer or click the little blue button to capture your time or pause the timers, whatever you need at that.

I totally agree. I find that it's a huge time saver. And every time I bring on a new team member, it's one of the first tips I give them when I'm showing them how to use Autotask. Just come in, grab your tickets, get them in the work list, hit the start, hit the stop, and don't forget your summary notes, you know, when you're recording your time at the end of the ticket. So I'm with you.

I love it. It's one of my favorite features of Autotask that really helps to smooth out the day. Absolutely. And so I'd actually be interested for any of our listeners, you know, that are listening to this. Shout out to us and, you know, let us know if you are using the ticket work list.

I'd be very interested to see actually who uses it and what you guys kind of do with it. You know, is it something that very few people know about? And if you don't know about it, hopefully, hopefully you've learned something out of this episode today. But if you do know about it, how do you use it? And how do you, do you kind of have it automated that when, you know, when you're signing a ticket to an engineer, it automatically goes into the work list.

You know, reach out to us, you know, through any of the socials, or you can reach out to us on our website at PSA impact.net. And we'd love to hear from you and love to hear how people are using the work list. Yeah, that was a great, a great episode, Rayanne. Love talking about the work list and as with everything in Autotask, always my favorite things to talk about. And I think this one was, you know, a pretty cool topic.

Cause I think it's one of those hidden gems that very few people know about. Oh yeah. I totally agree. And you know, it's always great talking about all things Autotask. And as I tell more and more people about our podcast here, you know, I always want to say, well, we try to say that we are PSA independent, but you know, we really talk about Autotask because a lot of the times people are coming to me because they need Autotask help or, you know, with one thing or another.

And I always direct them to our podcast. Cause I think that people are getting a lot of good information from us. And if you are listening to us and you're not finding any value in it, tell us what we can start to talk about that would provide you some value. Absolutely. And I agree.

I think, you know, last thing we want to do is people kind of not carrying on listening to it cause they're not getting any value from it. So if they, you know, Rayanne and I love talking about all things Autotask and, you know, no matter how small or how big the topic is or the feature that we talk about. And even if we've done it before, if there's something that you guys want us to, you know, to go through again in more detail or just to spend some time focusing on, you know, areas we haven't spoken about, then let us know. Cause we'd love to know what next to talk about and what you guys also love about the podcast and what you don't like about it. You know, the more feedback you can give us, the more we can make this, you know, something that's useful for you guys when you're driving to work or driving home or whatever the case might be.

Well, good to chat with you as always, Chris, have a great day. Absolutely. And you too. So all that's left for me to say, Rayanne, is your PSA is the key to your MSP success. So go out and make an impact on your world today.

Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Rayanne. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners. Yeah.