Add a status field in airfocus

Watch: Intro to status fields

Here's a quick intro to status field by airfocus founder Malte Scholz:

Benefits and what it does

The status field is a dedicated system field, within an airfocus workspace, which allows you to assign a status to your items. The status field has standardized status categories with customizable statuses per category to suit your team’s workflows. Get alignment and a clear view of what needs to be started, what’s in progress, and what’s completed – without the struggle of manually configuring a custom field on every workspace.

Status provides a holistic view of item progress across hierarchy levels and workspaces. You can track the progress of parent items (e.g. Jira epic) based on how many of its child items (e.g. Jira stories) have been closed.

The status field gets more visibility on all your views.

There are three fixed global status categories - ‘Draft’, ‘Active’, and ‘Closed’ - with the option to create as many statuses per category as you need to organize your team’s workflows.

With airfocus Hierarchy enabled, you can track progress on parent items based on closed child items.

Each category follows its own business logic impacting your workflows. For example, ‘Closed’ items advance progress, and ‘Draft’ items are hidden on share links or Portal.

You can use status categories as board columns or groups to group and visualize what's in ‘Draft’, ‘Active’, or ‘Closed’. This is especially useful for different levels of granularity.

You can get notifications for status changes on items or by ‘watching’ them.

We offer an easy-to-use migration tool to move the old custom single-select field you used for status to the system status field.

In the future, airfocus functionality and apps will build upon the status field, and therefore, we recommend switching now.

What you'll need

• Users with ‘Full’ access permissions to the workspace can add and configure statuses.
• Users with ‘Full’ access permissions to the workspace can perform the field migration on their workspace.
• You must have airfocus Hierarchy configured within your workspace in order to track the progress of a parent item.

How it works

You can manage and configure the status field in the ‘Fields’ tab of your workspace settings.

Status categories

Status is a mandatory field on airfocus which means that every item across workspaces has a status (and status category) associated with it. The categories serve to group statuses for alignment and progress tracking.

We give you three predefined status categories - ‘Draft’, ‘Active’, and ‘Closed’ - to help you group individual statuses. Inside each category, you need at least one status and can create as many statuses as you need to organize your team’s workflows and information.

Draft: Refers to items that haven’t been worked on yet. They do not get displayed on share links or portals.

Active: Refers to items that have been started.

Closed: Refers to items that are completed. When an item moves to ‘Closed’ status, it will advance the progress tracking of its parent(s).

Create and edit custom statuses

To add status, click ‘+ Add status’ underneath a category. You can also customize the color of each status and set which one of them should be the default option for new items via the triple dot menu options. Via that menu, you can also delete statuses.

Once your status field is all set up, you can see the status within your items on your views. On the item details, the status field can be found on the right of your assignees in which you can click either the arrow, which quickly advances to the next status or the drop-down menu to change to a specific one.

You can get notifications for status changes on assigned items or by 'watching' them. To do that, click on the dot menu ‘Item options’ on the top or of your item details.

Use status presets

You can maintain consistency across your team by using status presets. These are predefined status fields created by an airfocus admin that can be used in any workspace.

Create a new status preset

To create a status preset, airfocus admins can follow these steps:

1. Click your name in the bottom-left corner of airfocus.
2. Select Team settings.
3. Select Status presets from the tabs at the top of the settings panel.
4. Click + Add status preset from the navigation menu on the left side of the panel.
5. Type a name under “Preset name”.
6. Click + Add status under each of the status categories (Draft, Active, and Closed) to add one or more status fields to each.
7. Click Add preset from the bottom-right of the panel.

The status preset can now be used in any workspace on your airfocus account.

Use a status preset in a workspace

To use an existing status preset in a workspace, follow these steps:

1. Open the workspace you want to add the status preset to.
2. Open the three-dot menu from the right side of the workspace name at the top of the page.
3. Click Settings.
4. Select Fields from the tabs at the top of the settings panel.
5. Select Status from the navigation menu on the left side of the panel.
6. Click Use status preset from the top of the panel.
7. Use the dropdown under “Select preset” to choose a set of predefined status fields.
8. Click Update.

You can now use the preset options in your workspace’s status field.

Track the progress of a parent item

To track progress on a parent item, you’d need airfocus Hierarchy enabled. The progress is tracked on the parent item based on how many of its child items have been closed. Whenever you close a child item, the progress of its parent item will advance.

Progress tracking in Inbox view:

Progress tracking on Item panel

Progress tracking on Table view:

Filter options for status fields and categories

The status field brings more filtering options to airfocus. You can filter based on time elapsed since the last update of items. Time-based filter options are available for status as well as status categories:

Now, you can filter how long an item has or has not been updated based on a certain status or status category, when a status has been updated, and how long it has been in a certain category for example.

If you have a large number of items, we recommend using default filters to hide older completed (closed) items to improve the performance and speed of your workspaces. Here’s an example:

What status field does not do

It does not replace your current custom single-select status automatically. To make it easier for you, we’ve added the option for you to migrate your existing custom single-select status to a status field.

You cannot add, edit, or remove any of the overarching status categories.

Status field migration service

If you are currently using a custom single-select field as your status field, we offer an easy migration service to the status field for you. In addition to migrating the status field itself, the migration service also automatically changes all view settings, field mappings, filters, display options, and app configurations that you had configured with the single-select field you choose to migrate.

We recommend all our existing users to migrate as soon as possible as more airfocus functionality and apps will build upon the status field in the future. Please note that only users with ‘Full’ access permissions can perform the migration on their workspace.

To access the migration service, you have to go to the status field section in the Field settings. Then, click on ‘Migrate it’.

Select the single-select field you want to migrate to your status field. airfocus will then automatically generate matching status field options for all your single select field options.

Next, you can drag and drop your statuses into the right status categories.

Some items in your workspace may not have had an option of your custom single-select status field assigned to them. For these, you have to select a status that should be given to them during the migration, as the status field is a mandatory field that cannot be empty.

Furthermore, you can check the box to delete your old select field after the migration.

Migration service details

The migration service needs to be run per workspace.

If you had set one of the single select field options to be the default, that status will also be set as default during migration.

In case you had set up default filters in your views that filtered your items by status ‘is defined’ or ‘is not defined’, these will be deleted, as the status field would always have a status configured for every item.

If you choose to automatically delete your old status after the migration the following might be affected:

• Priority Ratings app: If you are using the single select field as a criteria, deleting this field will change all your priority scores.
• Zapier: If you have any zaps configured with the single select field, you need to update them to the status field on Zapier.

Some integrations do not support the usage of the status field for field mapping with 3rd party tools yet:

• Asana
• MS Planner
• Shortcut
• GitHub

At the launch of the status field, every existing workspace will have the following statuses pre-configured:

• Category ‘Draft’: ‘Draft’ in grey.
• Category ‘Active’: ‘Active’ in blue (default for new items).
• Category ‘Closed’: ‘Closed’ in green.

All existing items will have the ‘Active’ status until the user migrates the correct statuses.

Additional details

• At least one status is required for each status category.
• The status field is required for every item and cannot be left empty.
• The default status can be changed by the user.
• For item dependency and hierarchy cards display, you can see a small icon on the mini item cards indicating their statuses.
• The system status field can be used anywhere where custom single-select fields are used as well apart from:
  • Priority Ratings app / Priority Poker app
  • Some integrations that do not support field mapping yet:
    • Asana
    • MS Planner
    • Shortcut
    • Github

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