Do Not Require Start and End Time for Actions in NXT
In Database view, it is not required to add a start or end time for Phone calls, Meetings, or Tasks, but in Webview it is required. Please make these consistent and do not require them as truly the amount of time these take are irrelevant.
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Heather Heyd
- Sep 12 2016
Related ideas
The Start and End time default performance on Actions doesn't make any sense. It appears than when I start a new action, say from a Needs Attention card, it defaults the Start Time to the current hour and :30 minutes if it's currently between :00 and :29 minutes, and the top of the next hour if it's currently between :31 and :59 minutes, with a default End Time 30 minutes later (or something like that). The default When? option is Future. Changing the "kind" (category) of action has no effect on the times. So these default times don't make any sense and cause more problems than help:
If it's a future action, it depends on the "kind" whether Times make any sense or not. (E.g., I don't need a time for an emailing or mailing). Even if it's a phone call, there may or may not be an appt time and I don't want to have to delete defaulted time. Even for meetings, as a good fundraiser I could be indicating I want to have a meeting in the future (i'm scheduling a "move"), but I don't yet have an appointment with the constituent and therefore no time. It's unlikely my future action is going to start within the next 30 minutes if i'm adding it now.
If it's a past action, future start times make no sense. Nor does the field even need to be filled out--it probably doesn't matter what time the action took place and I don't want wrong information in the fields, not do I want to have to delete the time that defaults--that's just more work. Leave the time fields empty.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the default Times are just confusing and unhelpful. The Time fields should be empty until the user puts a specific value in them.
I wonder if this feature was created to incorporate Outlook and other mail services into NXT.
I would also add, that right now when you are adding past actions through NXT it takes away the option to edit the start and end times. This happens when you click "Past" instead of "Future." Yet, when the action actually posts to the record it still records a start and end time (which is erroneous - ours is 11:30am to 12:00pm). At the very least there should be an option for us to turn this off as a required field.