Findings sat in the backlog with no status change for two weeks, these are the ones losing money silently.
At a glance
Open findings whose Notion Status property has not changed for 14+ days. These rows are sitting in the database, nobody’s touching them, and every day that passes is silent revenue leakage from whatever the finding flagged (broken redirect, slow page, abandoned cart, leaking discount, etc).
| What it counts | Notion rows tagged vortexiq:finding where Status is in an open group AND the Last edited time (system property) is older than 14 days. Notion exposes last_edited_time on every page for free, no custom property needed. |
| Project / board scope | The single Findings database mapped during connector setup. Same scope as Open Findings. |
| What “no movement” means | We use Notion’s built-in last_edited_time, which updates on any edit to the page (status, properties, content, comments). So a finding sitting in “In Progress” for 20 days while the team adds research notes to it does NOT count as abandoned, because the page is being edited. Genuine abandonment means nobody opened or touched the page at all. |
| Status filter | Same open set as Open Findings (To-do + In progress groups). Done-group rows are never counted, even if they sat in Done for years. |
| The 14-day cliff | Day 13: not abandoned. Day 14, 00:00 UTC: counted. The threshold is fixed at the manifest level (abandoned_threshold_days: 14); custom thresholds per workspace are on the roadmap. |
| Why 14 days | Two-week sprint cadence. If a finding hasn’t moved in two sprints’ worth of time, neither sprint planning picked it up. That’s the working definition of “forgotten”. |
| Time window | RT (real-time, threshold applied at query time). |
| Alert trigger | >5 (warn) opens an amber banner; >15 (critical) triggers a red banner and a Slack ping if the merchant has Slack connected. |
| Sentiment key | {'type': 'threshold', 'thresholds': {'warn': 5, 'critical': 15}} |
| Roles | owner, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Notion data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
Same UK fashion brand from the Open Findings card, snapshot taken on 12 Mar 26. Of their 33 open findings, thelast_edited_time distribution is:
| Last edit age | Open rows | Counts as abandoned? | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0, 7 days ago | 12 | no | Active work, normal sprint flow. |
| 8, 13 days ago | 8 | no | Still inside the 14-day window, give them another sprint. |
| 14, 30 days ago | 7 | yes | Genuinely forgotten, last touched mid-Feb. |
| 31, 60 days ago | 4 | yes | Old. Probably deserves a triage decision (action or close). |
| 61+ days ago | 2 | yes | Embarrassing. Almost certainly should be moved to “Won’t fix”. |
last_edited_time ascending, and on each row they make one of three calls:
- Pick it up now (assign it to someone, move to In Progress, the act of editing resets the abandonment clock).
- Defer with a date (add a
Defer untilproperty and move it back to To-do, the team won’t see it again until that date). - Won’t fix (move to Done with a one-line comment explaining why, this is healthier than letting it rot).
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Abandoned is the high-value subset of Open. Always read alongside:| Card | Why it matters next to Abandoned | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| VortexIQ Findings Open | The denominator. Abandoned ÷ Open = “stale ratio”. | Stale ratio above 30% means the queue is mostly dead weight. Triage, don’t add capacity. |
| Finding Resolution Rate (90d) | Active turnover speed. | Low resolution rate + high abandoned = team is paralysed. High resolution rate + high abandoned = team picks easy ones, leaves hard ones. Different problem. |
| Avg Time-to-Fix | Days from creation to Done for the ones that do move. | If Time-to-Fix is fine but Abandoned is rising, the team is fast on what it picks up but bad at picking up everything. |
| Tickets by Assignee | Shows whether abandonment concentrates on one person. | If one assignee owns 8 of the 13 abandoned, that’s a single-point-of-failure conversation, not a process problem. |
| Overloaded Assignees (>10 open) | Helps you tell capacity from neglect. | Overloaded + abandoned high = capacity. Not overloaded + abandoned high = priority misalignment. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to reproduce this in Notion itself: Notion has no native abandonment view, but you can replicate ours in two minutes:Open the Findings database → New view → Table. Filter:The row count at the bottom should match this card. If you save the view as “Abandoned” and pin it to the top of the database, your team gets the triage list directly inside Notion without needing to leave the tool. Why our number may legitimately differ from your Notion view:Statusis notDoneANDLast edited timeis on or before today − 14 days. Sort:Last edited timeascending (oldest first).
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Time-zone boundary | Boundary days off | We compute “14 days ago” in UTC. If you’re in Sydney and look at the card around midnight, a row aged 13d 23h locally may already be 14d 1h UTC and so counted by us. The drift is at most one day. |
| Last edit on a sub-page | Ours higher | Notion’s last_edited_time on the parent row does NOT update when sub-pages or comments are edited. So a finding with active discussion in its sub-pages can still look abandoned to us. This is a known Notion API limitation. Workaround: ask the team to make a small change on the parent row (e.g. a status update or assignee change) when they’re actively working. |
| Bulk property edit by automation | Ours lower | If you run a Notion automation or a bulk script that touches every row’s properties (e.g. a nightly enrichment job), last_edited_time resets, and nothing ever looks abandoned. We recommend not touching properties on rows you’re not actually working. |
| Recently restored from trash | Ours lower | A row restored from Trash gets a fresh last_edited_time, so it looks young to us even if it had been abandoned for months before being deleted. Edge case, rarely material. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why is this number going up? Inflow continues but the team isn’t triaging. The fix is a 30-minute fortnightly triage (see Worked example), not “do more findings”. You can’t out-execute a queue that’s purely growing because nobody is making decisions. Should I just bulk-close everything older than a month? Tempting, but no. Bulk-closing makes the number drop and the underlying problem (findings not being read) gets worse, you’ve just added “we ignore findings” to the team culture. Better: spend an hour reading the 13 abandoned rows, decide which ones are real, close the others with a one-line “Won’t fix” reason. The reasons themselves become useful, after a few weeks of “Won’t fix because not relevant to subscription customers”, you tune Vortex IQ to stop generating that finding type. My team works in 4-week cycles, not 2-week sprints. Is 14 days the right threshold? For most teams, yes. If you genuinely run on monthly cadences and a 28-day threshold makes more sense, raise it with us, the threshold is a manifest constant today, but configurable thresholds per workspace are on the roadmap. In practice, even teams on 4-week cycles benefit from a 2-week abandonment alert, it’s the early warning, not the deadline. What if a finding is genuinely waiting on something external (vendor, supplier, customer)? Add aStatus = Blocked, external and map it to either In progress (still counts) or to Done (stops counting). The right call depends on whether you want it on someone’s radar or not. We recommend keeping it In progress and adding a comment with the unblock date, that way it shows up in Open Findings as a problem you’re actively monitoring, even if the work itself is paused.
The card flagged abandoned, but I edited the row this morning, why is it still showing?
60-second sync window, refresh the page in 2 minutes. If it’s still showing 5 minutes later, check that you actually edited a property on the parent row, not just a sub-page or a comment (Notion doesn’t update last_edited_time for those, see reconciliation table).
Can I see which findings are abandoned, not just the count?
Yes. Click the card to drill into the abandoned list, or open the Backlog by Status card. The full list is also available as a Notion view (see reconciliation section above).
Does the count include findings I’ve assigned to myself but haven’t started?
Yes, if 14 days have passed since the assignment without you editing the row. “Assigned” is not the same as “moving forward”. This is intentional, sitting on an assignment for two weeks is exactly the failure mode this card detects.
Why is this a Hero card?
Because it’s the queue-rot indicator. Open Findings tells you the queue depth; Resolution Rate tells you the throughput. Abandoned tells you whether the queue is alive. A team can have a perfectly fine open count and resolution rate, and still be quietly losing money on 8 forgotten high-impact findings.
My CEO asked for “zero abandoned findings”. Is that achievable?
Probably not, and probably not worth chasing. Aim for <5 consistently (warn threshold). Findings come in faster than perfect triage, a small abandoned drift between fortnightly triages is normal. The number to fight is the trend, not the absolute zero.