When you get one
Three things earn a notification, and nothing else does.- The agent is stuck and needs you. A decision, an approval, a password, an answer only you have. It cannot carry on until you say something, and waiting for you to happen to open the app is the slow way to find out.
- Something you asked for is ready. You asked for an invoice chaser, and the invoice chaser now exists. This fires once, when it is built.
- You asked an automation to tell you. “Let me know if the Xero sync fails.” “Ping me when an order over $10k comes in.” That instruction becomes part of the automation, and the notification fires because you asked for it.
When you do not
A run that worked says nothing. An automation that announces every morning that it ran gets muted within a week. The one notification that mattered gets muted with it. Silence means the run went fine, and the Triggers tab is where you go to read what happened. Nothing arrives because an agent found it interesting. Say an automation turns up something you would probably want to know. If you never asked to be told, the agent asks you first instead of deciding for you.Set it up
There are three switches between an agent and your lock screen. All three have to be on, and they are in two places.1
Turn on push for your account
Open Settings → Notifications and switch Push notifications on. This
follows you everywhere you sign in.
2
Set up the browser you are reading this in
On the same page, under Your browsers, press Set up. Your browser
asks for permission and you allow it.Every browser is separate. Chrome on your laptop and Safari on your phone
are two entries, and each one has to be set up where it is. Signing out
removes that browser from the list.
3
Leave the workspace switched on
Each workspace has its own toggle in its Settings → General, and it
starts on. Turn one off when a workspace gets noisy. It changes nothing for
your teammates, because the toggle is yours alone.
On iPhone, add the app to your home screen first. Safari in a normal tab
cannot show push notifications at all, and the setting will tell you so. Open
the share sheet, choose Add to Home Screen, then open the app from there
and set it up.
Asking an automation to notify you
Say it in the chat like you would say anything else.Watch the Stripe webhook and notify me when a payment fails.
When the nightly sync finishes with errors, send me a notification.
Let me know when someone submits the contact form, but only outside office hours.The agent builds the send into the automation, so it fires on the same event your job already handles. Notifications reach whoever has this workspace switched on, and there is no way to pick a person. “Notify only me” is not something the agent can build. If you are the only one with it on, you are the only one who hears it.
What a notification holds
A title, an optional second line, and somewhere to land when you tap it. Keep the detail out of it. A notification cannot be forwarded, searched, or read back next week, and most screens cut it off after a line. It is there to say a thing happened. The page it opens is where you read what the thing was. If you want something you can keep, ask for an email instead:Email me the failures rather than notifying me.Tapping a notification opens the workspace, on the page the agent pointed it at. Ask for that page and you get it:
Send me straight to the approvals screen when you notify me.
Nobody listening
An agent can send a notification that reaches no one. It happens when nobody has switched notifications on for that workspace. Nothing is broken and nothing failed. The agent checks before it builds a step around notifying. If nothing can arrive, it says so in the chat instead of sending into the void, and it tells you which switch is off.If one does not arrive
1
Check all three switches
Account push on, this browser set up, this workspace on. The workspace
toggle says so when the account switch above it is off, so start there.
2
Check the browser you are expecting it on
A browser you never set up gets nothing, even with everything else on. Open
Settings → Notifications and look for it under Your browsers.
3
On iPhone, open the app from the home screen
Notifications go to the installed app, not to a Safari tab. If you removed
the app from your home screen, that browser stopped existing as far as push
is concerned.
4
Ask the agent whether it sent one
The send is a step in your automation like any other, and it shows up in the
run.
Did the sync automation notify me last night?