Bulk actions: triage 50 conversations in one minute

Triage is its own job. Mondays start with a queue, post-incident days start with a flood, and the right answer is almost never "open them one by one." Bulk actions exist so you can apply the same decision to twenty conversations in the time it takes to apply it to one.

Selecting

Click the checkbox on the first conversation in the list. Then shift-click another row — every conversation between them is selected. ⌘-click (or Ctrl-click on Windows) toggles a single row in or out of the selection without disturbing the rest. The two together cover almost every selection pattern: a contiguous block plus a couple of exceptions.

There's no select-all-on-page button on purpose. We've watched too many agents accidentally close 200 conversations because the button was one pixel from where they expected. If you really want everything, shift-click the top and the bottom of the visible list — same result, half a second slower, zero accidents.

The bulk action bar

The moment one conversation is selected, a bar slides up from the bottom of the screen with the actions that make sense for the current selection:

• Close — bulk-close the selection. The reason picker appears once and applies to all.
• Assign — pick a teammate, queue, or "round robin." All assignments record one entry per conversation in the timeline.
• Tag — add or remove tags. Removing only affects conversations that had the tag; the others are untouched.
• Snooze — pick a duration. The conversations all wake up at the same moment.

Each action is atomic per-conversation: if 48 of your 50 succeed and 2 fail (because someone else closed them while you were picking), you'll see a toast that names the two and leaves the others applied. We never roll back the whole batch on a partial failure — a useful action that mostly worked is better than no action at all.

Esc to clear

Esc clears the selection and dismisses the bar. If you started selecting and changed your mind, Esc gets you back to a clean list — no checkboxes lingering, no accidental clicks waiting to happen.

The 50-in-a-minute claim

50 conversations in a minute is not marketing — it's what an experienced triage shift actually looks like, because most of those 50 share a decision. "Everything tagged 'shipping-delay' from yesterday assigned to logistics, snoozed two days." Three clicks. The rest of the queue is the interesting work; bulk actions exist so you have time for it.