Switching Context: You, Your Team, the Firm

The Context selector at the top of the sidebar answers one question: whose work am I looking at? Think of it as choosing an altitude. Me is the cockpit: your own work. A team is the control tower: everything your group is responsible for. An organization is the satellite view: the whole firm.

Most people live in Me and switch up an altitude when they’re planning, covering for someone, or hunting for a file that isn’t theirs. The switching is instant and nothing about the underlying data changes; only your vantage point does.

What Each Context Shows

Me shows work assigned directly to you, and only that. Two behaviors worth knowing:

• Work assigned to one of your teams that nobody has claimed yet does not appear under Me. Your personal view can be spotless while team work waits in the team’s view. If you belong to a team, glance at its context (or its Channels queue) before declaring victory for the day.
• If you work in more than one firm, Me combines your assignments from all of them into a single view. That’s deliberate: your day is your day, whichever firm the files belong to. Team and organization contexts are always one firm.

A team shows the team’s whole footprint: work assigned to the team itself plus work assigned personally to each member. So a team context is “everything my people are carrying,” not just the team’s shared queue. For a team lead, this is the honest workload picture; just don’t be surprised that members’ individual files appear there too.

An organization shows everything in the firm, regardless of who holds it. Big pools, best used for oversight rather than daily work.

You only see teams you belong to and firms you’re a member of; the selector isn’t a way to browse other people’s teams.

Which Views Listen, and Which Don’t

Context changes some views and deliberately leaves others alone:

Follow the context: Flows (the pools and their sidebar counters), Work Items, and Service Channels. Switch to your team and the Searches pool becomes your team’s searches.

Always personal, no matter what: the Overview dashboard and My Tasks. The “My” is literal. Switching to a team context does not put your teammates’ tasks into My Tasks; the team’s task picture lives in the team context of Flows and Work Items instead.

Reading the Counters

The colored counters in the Flows sidebar count exactly two things for the selected context:

• Blue = unscheduled: matters with no date, waiting for a scheduling decision.
• Red = overdue: matters whose scheduled date has passed.

Matters scheduled for the future aren’t counted in the badges at all; they’re parked, which is the point of scheduling. That’s why the pool page header can show a bigger picture than the sidebar badge: the header counts Total, Overdue, Unscheduled, and Scheduled for the context, before the Ready/Future toggle narrows the list.

So: badges tell you what needs a decision or is late. The header tells you the whole population. If the two numbers differ, the difference is your healthy, scheduled-for-later work.

Small Print

Your context choice is remembered on the device you set it on (and synced across tabs), but it’s not part of the page URL and doesn’t follow you to another computer. A colleague opening the same link sees their own context, not yours. And if a team you had selected is disbanded or you leave it, Laminar quietly drops you back to Me.

Tips

End the day in Me, start it one level up. Me tells you what’s yours; a morning glance at the team context tells you what’s unclaimed or piling up on a colleague before it becomes Friday’s emergency.

Use the organization context for questions, not work. “How many closings are in the pipeline firm-wide?” is an organization question. Working out of the firm-wide pool invites you to touch files that already have owners.

Trust the red. Whatever context you’re in, the red count is the same kind of honest: scheduled dates that have passed. Zero red across contexts is what a firm on top of its work looks like.