In our last release, we’ve introduced a new feature called: skip turn. It enables you to end your turn and return control over the collaboration to the other party with a single click.
This feature is perfect for instances when you have no action items on your turn and want to promptly return control to the other party. When you use skip turn, TakeTurns will send a notification to the other party that you’ve skipped and it is now their turn to work.
There’s a wide variety of reasons why you might skip. For example, skip turn is useful when collecting files or documentation to support a process such as: mortgage applications, onboard new vendors, or KYC. Its utility is particularly evident when documents are being sent over piecemeal, as opposed to being compiled and sent all at once. In such cases, where processing can’t begin until all documents are received, using Skip Turn is the ideal action to keep the collaboration moving efficiently.
Here’s how to use the Skip Turn feature:
Note: If you’ve made any changes in the collaboration, TakeTurns will prompt you to send an update instead.
For reference, here is how now not to skip [1]
Email #CannotSkip
We chose to develop this feature in response to the challenges we observed with email-based collaboration.
Regrettably, email #ForgotHowToSkip.
In email, the conventional way of “skipping” is not responding, which is far from ideal. At first glance, this might not seem like a big issue, but it leads to a cascade of unintended consequences.
- Often, the other party interprets the lack of response as a “closed thread,” leading them to create a new thread when they need to submit information. Regrettably, as soon as multiple threads emerge, chaos ensues, and threads start proliferating uncontrollably.
- When dealing with multiple participants, you may find some folks creating new threads, others responding to the original threads, and still others doing both, adding to the confusion.
The ambiguity of the “nonresponse” is a core reason why this behavior emerges. And the cumulative effect is that threads become difficult to track, sequencing gets muddled, and attachments are scattered all over. It’s easy to see how as a team, the parties perd le nord[2] or lose track of everything.
And, of course, the issues mount once you finish the collaboration. With all those threads, information and attachments end up spread all over the place. This makes it far more difficult to get the full picture of what’s happening in the collaboration and archive it. My colleague Fabien Bontemps described this problem and its challenges in his article on archiving and email.
Better transparency with skipping
While TakeTurns mitigates most of these issues by centralizing the entire collaboration in one place. We believe skip turn adds an extra layer of efficiency. It unambiguously signals to the other party that you have completed your part and are awaiting their input. This feature is another way that we’re helping improve the transparency and (we hope) trust between the parties in collaborations.
Learn more in our Help Center or follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube. And when you’re ready for chaos-free collaboration: try TakeTurns for free.
[1] #ForgotHowToSkip, or the skipping challenge, is a trending hashtag on TikTok. Apparently, a group of TikTok’ers (or perhaps it’s a tsuris of TikTokers?) have been asking older folks (Boomers, X’ers, and Millennials) to skip or show off that “hippity-hoppity gait that comes naturally to children” and, unsurprisingly, many older adults have forgotten how.
[2] perd le nord is a French idiom that literally means lose north. It means to lose one’s bearings. It’s believed that the “north” that’s being referenced is Polaris or the North Star, which since time immemorial, has been used in navigation. Or “to lose north” is to lose sight of the north star. Comment from the editor: It’s also worth pointing out that “north star” has also been used idiomatically in business to mean “mission” or “purpose.” Monsieur Jammes’ use of ‘perd le nord’ is especially humorous in that the main purpose of the collaboration often ends up being obscured by the confusing, administrative weight of email⸺losing the north (star) indeed!
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