Notifications

Notifications

Plank runs tasks that take minutes or hours. If you leave the chat — or leave the app entirely — nothing used to tell you when it was done. Notifications close that gap.

The three events

Plank can notify you when:

• A task finishes. Your assistant is done and the result is ready.
• A task needs your answer. Your assistant is blocked on a question and can't continue without you.
• A task fails. Something went wrong and the task stopped.

Each has its own on/off switch in Settings → Notifications.

When Plank itself hit a problem and is continuing the task automatically, you are not told it failed. If a task stopped because of a hiccup on Plank's side (the chat says «The connection to the agent was interrupted — continuing automatically»), Plank waits about two and a half minutes before sending a failed notification, and doesn't send it at all once the task has picked up again. If the automatic attempt doesn't work out, you do get the failed notification — then the task really does need you.

When your Setup lead writes to you

Your Setup lead — the assistant guiding your first days in Plank — can check in around 10:00. If you've gone quiet and it writes to you in your setup chat (about the next step of your plan you haven't done yet), you get a notification quoting what it wrote, and tapping it opens that chat.

It only comes back when you've really gone quiet: not while you've written anywhere in Plank in the last 20 hours, at most one such reminder a day across all your workspaces, and with longer pauses between them (the second comes 3 days after the first, the third 7 days after that). It stops for good once you're working in that workspace on your own (three chats of your own there, or messages there on two different days), and a workspace you create after you've already been working in Plank doesn't get these check-ins at all. The reminder is that one chat message — it never also lands in your Inbox.

It follows the Plank needs my answer switch, but unlike a question it does not come through during quiet hours. It stays quiet about the chat you're looking at, and Hide details on the lock screen hides its text like everything else. A check-in that has nothing to ask you doesn't notify at all, and after three unanswered follow-ups it stops writing. Other scheduled tasks, automations and webhooks don't send notifications of their own. A reminder you asked for is the exception, covered next.

Reminders you asked for

When you ask your assistant to remind you of something, the reminder arrives as a post in your Inbox and as a push notification. It follows the Plank needs my answer switch, and a reminder set for a time you chose does come through during quiet hours. Before confirming, the assistant tells you which of your devices will ring. See Automations for how it works.

Plank stays quiet about a chat you're looking at

If you're actively looking at a chat — it's open and your phone or browser tab is in front of you — Plank won't notify you about that chat. You're already watching it happen; a notification would just be noise.

Switch to a different chat, or put the app in the background, and that chat becomes eligible for notifications again. If you'd rather be notified even for the chat you have open, turn off Don't notify for the open chat in Settings — it's on by default, but it's your call.

Quiet hours

Set a quiet-hours window (for example 22:00–08:00) and Plank won't send finished or failed notifications during it. It doesn't matter what else is happening — nothing arrives until the window ends, on the day it ends.

Quiet hours drop notifications. They don't save them for morning. If a task finishes at 2am inside your quiet window, you will not get a notification about it at 2am or at 8am — Plank doesn't queue it up and deliver it late. The task itself is still sitting there, finished, whenever you next open the chat; quiet hours only affects whether a push interrupts you.

"Needs your answer" always comes through, quiet hours or not, and so does a reminder you set for a time. A task that's blocked on a question is burning time until you answer it, in a way a finished task simply isn't, and a reminder's time is one you picked. If you don't want to be woken for anything, ever, turn the Plank needs my answer toggle off entirely rather than relying on quiet hours to catch it — quiet hours won't.

Sound

One switch, Play a sound, controls whether notifications play your device's normal notification sound. Plank never bundles a custom sound or fights your ringer or Focus/Do Not Disturb settings — it always defers to those.

On Android, your system notification settings win. Android freezes a notification channel's sound the moment it's first created, so Plank creates two channels up front — one with sound, one silent — and the in-app switch simply chooses which channel a notification goes to. If you've separately muted Plank's channel in Android's own system settings, that overrides the in-app switch. This is intended: your system-level choice about an app's notifications should always be the last word, not something an in-app toggle can quietly undo.

Hiding details

By default a notification shows useful context: the chat title and either the file it produced or a short description. Turn on Hide details on the lock screen and every notification instead reads generically — "A task finished" or "A task needs your answer" — with no chat name, no filename, nothing that could be read over your shoulder or shown on a lock screen you don't control.

Turning notifications on

Notifications are turned on from Settings → Notifications → Enable on this device, and only there — Plank never asks in the middle of a chat, and never raises a permission dialog the moment you open the app (that dialog is the most reflexively-denied one on the internet, and on the web a denial is close to permanent). Choosing Enable on this device is what raises your browser's or phone's permission dialog.

On Safari on macOS, web notifications need one extra step: add Plank to the Dock. Safari refuses to register for push notifications for a site that hasn't been added to the Dock as its own app. If notifications aren't working in Safari, open plank.md in Safari, then choose File → Add to Dock, and try enabling notifications again. Settings shows this same instruction if Safari reports it can't register.

On mobile, a native app update is required. If you installed Plank before this feature shipped and haven't updated since, notifications won't be available on that install until you update — this isn't something that arrives automatically in the background the way most changes do.

The browser tab says when a chat is waiting

While Plank is open in a browser tab, the tab's title starts with the number of chats waiting for your answer — for example (1) Needs your reply — Plank — so you can see it from another tab. It needs no permission and nothing turned on, and it clears once you answer.

Tapping a notification

Tapping a notification opens that chat — the exact conversation the task ran in, not just the workspace it lives in. It works the same way whether the app was closed, in the background, or already open in front of you, and on mobile it opens the chat pane rather than the file viewer.

On iPhone, the live task card on your lock screen and in the Dynamic Island works the same way: tap anywhere on it and you land in the chat it's showing — the finished or waiting task if there is one, otherwise the task that's running (the one at the top of the card, if several are). If you weren't signed in when you tapped, Plank takes you to that chat right after you sign in.

If the chat is in a workspace you no longer have access to, Plank tells you so on the way in rather than quietly landing you somewhere else. If the chat itself was deleted or archived, it opens and the conversation tells you it's no longer there.

Your devices

Settings → Notifications → Your devices lists every device currently registered to receive your notifications — phone, browser, whatever you've turned it on for. Remove any device you no longer use, or use Enable on this device to add the one you're on now.

What you won't get

Notifications are tap-through only — tapping one opens the chat (above), it doesn't let you reply from the notification itself. There's no email channel, and on a shared workspace chat, only the person whose turn it is gets notified — not the whole team.