From email to owner: how a commitment gets a deadline in VIRO

VIRO Actions is where every tracked promise in a workspace lives. This post is a straight walkthrough of what actually happens to a commitment from the moment it's created to the moment it's closed -- no hypotheticals, just the states the product moves it through.

Creating a commitment

A commitment starts life with a type and, where relevant, the customer it's for. It gets exactly one owner at a time. Assigning that owner to someone other than the person creating the commitment is treated as a delegation, and stays pending until the new owner accepts it or reports a blocker -- an owner isn't quietly reassigned without their knowledge. Self-assigning or unassigning a commitment you already own doesn't trigger that flow; delegation only matters when responsibility is actually moving to someone else.

Accept, or report a blocker

A delegated commitment shows up for its new owner with two honest options: accept it, or report what's blocking them from taking it on. Reporting a blocker doesn't silently reassign the commitment away -- it flags the blocker and keeps the owner attached, because the point is visibility, not automatically routing work around a problem no one has actually looked at.

Escalation before the deadline, not after

A commitment that's still open as its due date closes in moves into an at-risk state ahead of everything else in the list. If an escalation policy is set, the owner's manager is notified before the deadline is missed. The Home screen's Needs attention list surfaces pending assignments and blocked items for the signed-in owner directly, so nothing sits invisible in a queue nobody's watching.

Closing a commitment means linking evidence, not just checking a box

Completion in VIRO is evidence-gated. A commitment doesn't close because someone clicked "done" -- it closes because a specific artifact, usually the sent message that answered the original request, is linked to it as proof. That link is what makes an Actions record something you could actually show a customer or an auditor, rather than a self-reported status.

None of this requires a separate project-management tool bolted onto your inbox. It's the same mailbox, the same workspace, with a layer underneath that refuses to let a promise disappear just because the conversation moved on.