Managing tasks from a chat

Your task list is available in every chat

You do not have to go to your task list to use it. Anything you can do on the Tasks page you can ask for in a conversation, and Rhazes does it there.

That matters because the moment you notice a task is almost always the middle of doing something else. A list you have to navigate to is a list you do not update.

Asking what is outstanding

Ask what is on your list and Rhazes tells you. By default you get your open tasks, and you can narrow it however you would ask a colleague:

• By when: what is due today, what is overdue, what is coming this week.
• By patient: everything outstanding for one person.
• By words in the task: anything mentioning bloods, or a letter, or a particular department.
• By status: including what you have already completed, rather than only what is left.

This is the fastest way to start a session. Asking what is overdue before a ward round takes one sentence and needs no navigation.

Adding tasks

Ask for a task and it is filed. Ask for several and they are filed together, which suits the end of a consultation where three or four things came out at once.

Say the due date in your own words and it is set. Name a patient and the task is linked to them, as long as exactly one of your patients matches that name. Name a list and it goes on that list, with the list created if it does not exist yet.

Ticking one off

You can complete a task by describing it. You do not need to have it open, or know any identifier for it. "Mark the ACR chase as done" is enough.

If several open tasks match what you said, Rhazes shows you which ones it found and asks which you meant, rather than guessing and closing the wrong one. That is worth knowing, because it means you can be loose in how you describe a task without risking the wrong one being ticked.

Changing a task

Ask and Rhazes will retitle a task, move its due date, clear a due date entirely, change its priority, add notes to it, change its status, or link it to a patient.

Re-dating from a chat is the one people use most. When it becomes obvious that Friday is not happening, saying so in the conversation is faster than opening the list to change a date.

Deleting versus completing

Rhazes treats these as genuinely different things and will only delete when you actually ask to delete or remove a task. Asking to tick something off completes it instead.

That distinction is deliberate. Completing records that the work happened; deleting removes the evidence it existed. For anything filed as part of a safety net, that difference matters. See Completing and deleting tasks.

Delegating the organising

You can also hand the tidying over. Ask Rhazes to move tasks onto lists, group what belongs together, or make sense of a list that has grown untended, and it will do the reorganising for you.

There is a fuller version of this on the Tasks page, where Rhazes proposes a list for every open task with a reason for each, and applies the whole thing or none of it. See Organising tasks into lists.

Every task remembers where it came from

A task added from a chat keeps a link to that conversation and to the exact message that created it.

So a task that stops making sense a week later can be traced back to what was actually said at the time, rather than leaving you to reconstruct it from six words typed in a hurry.