Snooze a task

[Bradley Ross]

Problem

What are some techniques to snooze a task in ServiceNow?

Motivation

When I look at my task list, it is full of things I don't need to work on right now. For example, our Service Desk has a list of incidents assigned to their group. After they update the incident with a note, perhaps nobody else in the group needs to work on it until the following day. Yet there it sits in the task list. Staring every agent in the face. Sapping their mental energy to decide over and over again that they don't need to do anything with that task.

Perhaps they could just sort their list of tasks by the updated date! As they add a comment to the incident, it drops to the bottom of the list. Now they can just work on the items that are the oldest. However, this has the effect of putting new records at the bottom of the list, where they might languish for a full day.

Perhaps I could set the incident in a pending state with an automatic timer to pop it out of the pending state at a particular time. (We already have this function on our incident form.) This is close to what I want, but it has some undesirable side effects. I don't want to pause an SLA timer because an incident is pending in this way, for example. I send out updates to the user when the state changes on their incident. I don't want that to happen if I'm just trying to snooze the record.  

I need the ability to snooze any task in ServiceNow. I use this in Slack. I use this in Outlook. I use this in Gmail. I need this is ServiceNow.

Possible implementations

"Ignore until" date/time field. I could add an "ignore until" field to every type of task that I want to snooze. It would be easy to filter snoozed tasks in common views like "My Work". We could have a scheduled job that runs every 15 minutes that looks for tasks to erase the contents of the "ignore until" field once the time has passed. Perhaps the event system in ServiceNow could be used to do this instead of a scheduled job.

UI Action for snoozing. A UI action that prompts the user for a number of minutes, hours, or days to snooze a task. This would fill in the "ignore until" field behind the scenes. This would eliminate the need to have a dedicated field on every form.

Maybe I'm missing an obvious solution. I'd be interested to hear about ideas people have for implementing snooze.

[Geoffrey2]

"Staring every agent in the face. Sapping their mental energy..."   Hahahahahah   I love it. Great Business Case.

The scenario reminds me of this: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/helsinki-servicenow-platform/page/administer/task-table/concept/r...

You can set yourself a reminder to do something at a time defined in one of the Time/Date fields.

I'm not saying to do this, but you can reuse the follow_up field for something similar.

Set your Module filter to be "Follow up is empty, or Follow up is before now, or Follow_up is on or after tomorrow". Then create some convenient UI Actions or something to set the Follow up time. So your "Snooze" button could be setting Follow up to 12 hours from now, or something. You could also place the field on the form so they can enter any date they like.

Another useful tool for these kind of problems is Scheduled Events.

gs.eventQueueScheduled('event_name', current, gs.getUserID(), gs.getUserName(), current.follow_up);

Use it with a Script Action to do something.