Your first Thread

Time to give Rally a job. A Thread is one conversation about one piece of work, so the first thing to decide is what that work is. It can be small. "Plan the team offsite" is a Thread. So is "Why is the invoice from March wrong?"

Start a Thread#

Every Thread starts in a Channel, so begin with one. In a new Organization the only Channel is General, which makes this the easiest decision you will make all day.

1. Click Channels at the left edge of the window, then click General.
2. At the bottom of the Channel's screen is a message box that says Start a thread in General. Type what you want Rally to do.
3. Press Return, or click Start thread. ⇧ Shift Return gives you a new line instead.

That is the only way to start a Thread, and it is quicker than it sounds. There is no name to think up and no form to fill in: your message becomes the Thread's first message, and the Thread comes into being the moment you send it. Nothing is saved before then, so a half-typed idea you change your mind about leaves no empty Thread lying around.

The new Thread opens in a pane beside the Channel, Rally starts on your message straight away, and the Thread joins the Channel's feed and your Threads list.

You can attach files to that first message, just as you would to any other. Mentioning a teammate by name adds them to the Thread too. People in the room has more on who is in a Thread.

To bring in a conversation you had elsewhere instead, see Bring in a conversation from Claude or ChatGPT. New Channels are covered in Channels.

What to ask#

Write to Rally the way you would write to a capable colleague: say what you want and what it is for. If you are stuck for a first request, try something like this:

Find out what the three most popular project management apps charge for a team of ten, and write me a one-page comparison as a document.

That sends Rally to the web, has it read and compare, and ends with a document you can open, which shows off a good deal of what it does in one go. None of it needs a connection to your other tools. Once you have connected some, try asking about your own calendar, issues or documents instead.

Watch Rally work#

While Rally works, a row with a small animated orb shows what it is doing and for how long:

• Thinking for 4s while it works out its approach.
• Using Slack for 8s, or the name of whichever tool it is using, with that tool's logo.
• Working for 1m 12s on longer stretches.

When each step finishes, the row switches to the past tense: Thought for 4s, Used Slack for 12s. Once the answer is in, all of that folds into one line, such as Worked for 2m 05s. Click the line, or its arrow, to open it and see each step Rally took.

The answer itself appears as Rally writes it, a few words at a time, with a small pulsing caret at the end. You can start reading straight away. The conversation follows the newest text as it arrives. If you scroll up to read something earlier, it stops following and a round Jump to latest arrow appears above the message box to take you back down.

Some jobs take a few seconds and some take much longer. You do not have to watch. Go and do something else. The Thread's status dot in your Threads list, and the count on the Threads button, will tell you when it needs you. While Rally works covers following along, steering, stopping and what to do if a run fails.

Names and icons#

You did not give your Thread a name, and you do not need to. Rally names it for you, as it does for a Breakout you branch off from a message, a Thread started from Slack, or a conversation you import.

• At first, a shimmering grey bar sits where the name will go. That is Rally reading the opening request.
• A few seconds later, a short name of two to four words replaces it, in the language of your request, and Rally picks an icon to suit the subject.
• After the conversation has had more than five messages, Rally takes one more look and may improve the name, now that the real subject has had time to show up. It does this once, and then the name stays put.
• If no name arrives within about a minute, Rally gives up waiting and uses the first line of the opening message as the name.

Renaming a conversation yourself settles the matter: Rally never overwrites a name a person chose. The same goes for an icon you pick yourself.

Every Thread gets an icon and colour, even if nobody chooses one. To change them, click the icon at the left of the Thread's title pill, pick a colour, then an icon. Names, icons and colours covers renaming and everything else about how a Thread looks. A Thread with a nice icon is not more productive, but it is easier to find, which is nearly the same thing.

An empty Thread#

If you open a Thread that has no messages in it yet, it says Ready to begin and Send a message to start work in this thread. Type in the box at the bottom and Rally gets going.

Where to go from here#

That is the whole loop: start a Thread, say what you need, and work on it together.

The next chapter, Working in a Thread, is about doing that well: writing messages, attaching files, steering Rally while it works, and bringing your teammates into the conversation.