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Assignees and subscribers

Two concepts sit side by side on every action item:
  • Assignees are the people on the hook for the work. Being assigned means “you’re accountable for this getting done.”
  • Subscribers are the people kept in the loop. Being a subscriber means “you want to know when something changes about this item — status, priority, due date, and so on.”
Every assignee is automatically a subscriber. Not every subscriber is an assignee. This separation lets someone (a manager, a client-facing admin, a teammate covering for someone on leave) follow an item’s progress without being on the hook to do the work themselves.

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How you become a subscriber

There are four ways you end up on an item’s subscriber list. Each one has a name in Helm, because it’s how the notification preferences decide what to send you by default.
Every action item you create automatically adds you as a subscriber under Created. You’ll hear about changes to items you created until you explicitly unsubscribe.
When you’re added as an assignee, you’re automatically added as a subscriber under Assigned. This covers two situations in your preferences:
  • Assigned to me — you were assigned directly by a teammate
  • Bulk-assigned — you were assigned automatically by a template when a new booking came in
The distinction matters because templates can assign you to many items at once (one booking with five template items means five subscriptions). Helm lets you set different notification defaults for each, so bulk assignments don’t flood your inbox.
When you click the Follow button on an item (or follow the whole event — see below), you’re added as a subscriber under Watching. This is the explicit “keep me in the loop” opt-in, and it has its own notification defaults in preferences.
A special case of Watching: instead of following individual items, you follow the whole event. Every action item currently on that event gets a Watching subscription for you, and so does every new item added later (whether manually or through a template).To follow an event, open it and click the bell icon on the action items panel header. The button reads “Follow all items on this event” when you’re not following, and “Stop following this event” once you are.

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The subscriber chip

Every action item shows a subscriber chip — the small avatar cluster next to its title, showing who’s subscribed. Click the chip to open a menu that lets you:
  • See the full list of subscribers and the source each one came from
  • Toggle your own subscription on or off
  • Customize your notifications for this specific item (see Per-item overrides)
If you’re not subscribed, the chip shows a Subscribe button. One click and you’re on the list.

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Per-item overrides

Sometimes you want different behavior on a single item than on everything else — quieter notifications on a personal one, louder on a high-stakes one. Open the subscriber chip menu on the item and pick one of three modes:
Use your global notification preferences for this item. This is the default on every item, and the one you want most of the time.
Turn off every notification from this item. You’ll still see the item in Triage, and status changes still happen — you just don’t get pinged about any of them. Good for items you’ve delegated but don’t want to forget.
Fine-grained control — pick which types of changes notify you on exactly this item. The menu shows the same change categories as your global preferences (status changes, priority changes, deadline alerts, and so on), but scoped to this one item.
Switching back to Inherit any time wipes your custom settings for the item and restores whatever your global preferences say.

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Unsubscribing

Whenever you’re a subscriber for any reason, you can unsubscribe with one click — either from the subscriber chip menu on the item, or from the item’s right-click context menu. Unsubscribing doesn’t affect anyone else’s subscription to that item. If you were assigned and unsubscribe manually, you’ll stop getting notifications — but you’re still assigned. Your accountability and your notifications are separate: unsubscribing stops the alerts, but you stay on the hook for doing the work. To step off the assignment too, remove yourself from assignees.

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Up next

See Notifications for how to configure what each subscription source actually notifies you about — deadline reminders, change events, and booking summaries.