A Situation is one matter Havilo is carrying for you: an introduction someone asked for, a document you owe, a question left unanswered. Havilo reads your mail and calendar, works out what is open and who owes whom what, and keeps that assessment current as new messages arrive.
A Situation is not a task you created and it is not a ticket. Nobody files one, and nothing moves it by hand. It is Havilo's reading of what is actually happening, so it changes when the world does.
Standings
Every matter sits under one heading, by who is blocked. A descending ladder: you, then someone else, then Havilo, then nobody, then it is over.
| Standing | What it means |
|---|---|
| Needs you | You control the next step |
| Waiting | Someone else owes something, and the row names them |
| Reading | Havilo has not judged it yet |
| Quiet | Open, but nothing about it deserves attention now |
| Resolved | Over, with the reason it ended |
Needs you and Waiting are the short list worth reading. The others are there when you go looking.
How a matter closes
Two things move a matter, and neither is a button.
The action happens. You send the reply, the meeting gets booked, the intro goes out. Havilo sees it in the mailbox and the matter resolves on its own.
You say what you know. Work you finished outside your mailbox leaves no trace anywhere — a call, a conversation at an event, a decision to drop it. Havilo cannot see any of that, so a matter like this stays open forever unless you tell it.
There is deliberately no way to cancel, dismiss, archive or close a matter directly, for you or for the assistant. A button that closed a matter by decree would let one mistaken click bury a real obligation, and nothing afterwards could tell you it had happened.
Testimony
Testimony is what you know that the record does not. You write it in your own words, on the matter it is about, from the box on the row or on the matter's own page.
Useful testimony sounds like:
- "I called her Tuesday and we settled it on the phone."
- "This went to me by mistake — it is Priya's."
- "They pushed the deadline to the 30th."
- "We decided not to do this."
Your words then enter the same record as a message or a meeting, and Havilo reasons about them. That is the important part: testimony is weighed, not obeyed. Saying "I already sent that" puts your claim in front of Havilo alongside the mail that says otherwise, and Havilo works out what is true. It does not close the matter by fiat.
Which means you are allowed to be wrong, and being wrong costs nothing. That is the whole reason it works this way.
Two things follow from testimony being a record rather than a setting:
- It cannot be edited or taken back. A later thought is a later statement. File the correction and Havilo reads both.
- It is yours. Testimony is private to the person who wrote it, and you can only file it on a matter you can already see.
Asking the assistant
The assistant can read your matters and file testimony for you, which is usually faster than opening each one. "What needs me this week", "what am I waiting on from Tessellate", "I already handled the Halden intro — close it out" all work.
Because one sentence is often true of several matters at once, the assistant files it on all of them in a single step. It files it without stopping to ask, and the conversation shows the exact sentence it recorded for you and which matters it went on. If it got something wrong, tell it, and it files the correction.
Getting access
Situations need the Intelligence capability enabled for your workspace, and each member needs permission to see them. Without both, the Situations area is not available and the assistant will say so rather than answer from somewhere else. Your workspace administrator grants this.