Saved views: the small habit that keeps a team focused

Most people on a busy project open the board, scroll, and rebuild the same filter they built yesterday. It takes a minute each time, and some days nobody bothers, so the overdue job three columns over goes unread until a client asks about it.

Saved filters fix that, but only if you treat them as a habit rather than a feature. This article covers which saved views an agency project needs, how one shared view can show every person their own work, and how to keep the list short enough that people use it.

Why filters get rebuilt every morning#

Filters are cheap to set and easy to lose. You narrow the board to your own jobs, open one, answer a comment, and come back to a different project. By the next morning the filter you needed is gone and you start again.

The cost isn't the minute. It is the question each person answers differently. One designer checks what is overdue, another checks what is due this week, and the studio lead checks neither because they are looking at the whole board. Three people on the same project end up with three ideas of what matters today.

A saved view gives the team one answer to "what should I look at first?". It is a named question you can ask in one click.

What a saved view keeps#

In Skybase, a saved view keeps three things:

• The filters. Members, Client teams, Labels, Priorities, the due date filter and Completed.
• Where it opens. A view remembers whether it was saved from the Board, the Table or the Calendar.
• The table's layout. A table view also keeps its columns, grouping and sort.

The due date filter has four choices that cover most planning questions: Overdue, Due today, Due this week (today and the six days after) and No due date. Completed lets you show finished jobs with the rest, Hide them, or show Only them.

To save one, set up the filters, choose Views, then Save current view…, and give it a Name. Turn on Share with the project if everyone on the project should see it. The saved views guide walks through every control.

One shared view, a different list for each person#

This is the detail that makes shared views worth the effort. When you filter Members by yourself and save the view, Skybase doesn't store your name. It stores "me", which means whoever opens the view.

So a shared view called "My week", filtered to yourself and Due this week, shows each person on the project their own week. You set it up once and every designer, writer and strategist gets a personal list from it. Nobody has to build their own, and when someone joins the project, the view already works for them.

Five views worth setting up on every project#

You don't need many. These five cover the questions an agency team asks most. Set up the shared ones when the project starts, and let people add personal ones as they need them.

1. My week (shared)#

Members set to yourself, due date set to Due this week, Completed set to Hide. Open it on the Board or the Calendar, whichever the team plans from. This is the view people should open first each morning.

2. Overdue (shared)#

Due date set to Overdue, Completed set to Hide, no member filter. Save it from the Table, grouped by assignee and sorted by due date, so the oldest overdue job for each person sits at the top. It is the view for a Monday stand-up, because it puts the slipped work in front of the whole team, not only the person who owns it.

3. Needs a date (shared)#

Due date set to No due date, Completed set to Hide. A job with no date is a job nobody has committed to. Opening this view once a week turns "we'll get to it" into a date or a decision to archive the job. If your team plans from the calendar, the Unscheduled tray does the same job there. Planning deadlines with a calendar that matches the board covers that routine.

4. Critical and important (shared)#

Priorities set to Critical and Important, Completed set to Hide, saved from the Table grouped by priority. Priorities only help if people look at them, and this view is the shortest route to the work that matters most. If your board uses Critical for everything, this view will show you that too.

5. A client's work (shared, for agencies with client teams)#

If you use client teams, the Client teams filter narrows a project to the jobs the people in one client's team are working on. It is useful when one project covers several of a client's departments, or before a call with one of them.

Personal views sit alongside these. A designer might keep "Waiting on me" filtered to a label the team uses for work in review. A studio lead might keep a table of everything due this week across every member, with the columns they read in a status meeting.

Keep the list short#

Saved views decay. Someone saves "Launch prep (old)", someone else saves "launch prep", and six months later the menu is a list nobody trusts. A few rules keep it useful:

• Name the question, not the filter. "Overdue" beats "due:overdue, hide completed". People pick a view by what they want to know.
• Share only what the team should use. Everything else stays under My views, where only its owner sees it.
• Update rather than duplicate. While a view is open, the Views button shows its name after Viewing: and adds (edited) once you change something. Choose Update to keep the change instead of saving a near copy.
• Delete the dead ones. Deleting a shared view removes it for everyone on the project, so check with the team first, but do it.

Shared views appear under Shared with project with the name of whoever saved them, so it is always clear who to ask about one.

Who can save, share and change views#

• Save a view for yourself: anyone who can see the project, guests included.
• Share a view with the project: administrators, and team members on the project. Guests can't share views.
• Rename, update or delete a view: the person who saved it, or an administrator.

That means a client who is a guest on your project can keep their own "Needs my review" view without it appearing in your team's menu.

Links do the same job for one-off questions#

Not every question deserves a saved view. Filters live in the page address, so copying the link shares exactly what you are looking at. Whoever opens it sees the same filters, as long as they can see the project. A link to "Leo's overdue jobs" in a message is often better than a view nobody will open twice.

A worked example: Harbour Studio sets up its views#

Take a small agency, say Harbour Studio, rebranding its client Northwind. This is a made-up example. The board runs Brief, In progress, Client review and Done, and the job types are Design, Copy, Strategy and Dev.

Maya Chen, the studio lead, sets up the views on the Monday the project starts. She filters Members to herself, sets the due date to Due this week, hides completed jobs, and saves it from the Board as "My week", shared with the project. When Priya Shah opens it, she sees her own jobs, including hero-direction-b.png, which is waiting for approval. When Leo Ortiz opens it, he sees his.

Next, Maya switches to the Table, clears the member filter, sets the due date to Overdue, groups by assignee and sorts by due date. She saves it as "Overdue" and shares it. In the Monday stand-up, "Brand guidelines v3" sits at the top of the list. It is with Tom Becker at Northwind for review, so the team agrees Maya will chase Tom, and nobody changes the date to make the list look tidy.

Maya adds "Needs a date" for jobs with No due date. The first time she opens it, "Social launch kit" is in it, and it gets a day on the calendar that afternoon.

Ava Lindqvist, the copywriter, saves a personal view for herself: Copy jobs carrying the label the team uses for client feedback, in the table, sorted by due date. It sits under her My views and nobody else's menu changes.

Tom, as a single-project guest, can save his own views too. He can't share them, so the team's menu stays as Maya set it.

A checklist for your next project#

• Set up three to five shared views on the day the project starts.
• Filter Members by yourself for any view meant to show each person their own work.
• Name each view after the question it answers.
• Use Update when a view changes, instead of saving a copy.
• Delete shared views the team has stopped opening.
• Share a link, not a view, for one-off questions.

Saved views work best on a board with clear columns, labels and priorities. Kanban for agencies covers that structure, and the table view page shows the grouping and sorting a saved table keeps.

A team that opens the same few views every morning spends its first minute on the work, not on finding it. Set them up once, keep the list short, and let "me" do the rest.