Assigning a ticket says who owns the problem; creating todos says what to do, when, and where. As a dispatcher, todos are your real lever. This lesson covers what todos are, how they differ from tickets, and how a dispatcher creates and manages them for the team.

Understanding Todos

Problem: Assigning a ticket to an agent doesn't actually tell them what to do or when. A ticket is a problem; the work to resolve it is a sequence of actions. Without a way to specify and schedule those actions, dispatcher work collapses into "here's a ticket, figure it out yourself."

Horizon's answer: Todos. A todo is one specific unit of work attached to a ticket — "call the customer back at 3pm," "do the onsite," "write the report." Assigning a ticket says who owns the problem; creating todos says what to do, when, and where. As a dispatcher, todos are your real lever.

You already know the basics

If you've read the Agent Training Guide → Understanding Todos (or worked as an agent), the concept is the same. The full reference lives there:

• A ticket has many todos.
• Two flavors: Scheduled (fixed time, customer-facing) and Floating (dynamic time, internal).
• Lifecycle: Pending → In Progress → Completed (or Cancelled / Deferred).
• Each todo has a delivery method (Onsite, Remote, Internal), a duration, and (optionally) a time and place.

If any of that is unclear, read the agent guide section first, then come back.

What's different from a dispatcher's seat

You'll be creating and managing todos for other agents, not yourself. Three things matter that didn't matter as an agent:

1. You create todos for someone

When you create a todo from the dispatch panel (or while looking at a ticket), you choose who it's assigned to. As an agent you only ever created todos for yourself. As a dispatcher, you're choosing the agent — the same way you choose them for direct assignment.

2. The agent may need to accept or decline

Depending on how your account is configured, todos you create for an agent may arrive in their dashboard as incoming — meaning the agent has to Accept before the todo becomes real work on their plate, or Decline to send it back to you.

If your account requires acceptance, expect to see declines occasionally. Common reasons:

• The agent is overloaded and another agent should take it.
• The agent thinks the work is wrong (wrong type, wrong customer, wrong time).
• The agent is on a different schedule than you assumed.

When a todo is declined, it lands back in your queue. Re-route it — either to a different agent or back through dispatch.

3. Todos drive the team's calendar

Every scheduled todo you create shows up on the agent's calendar — and on your Dispatch Calendar (the Dashboard from the previous lesson, with deeper drag-and-drop coverage in a later lesson). When you look at the team's schedule, you're looking at the sum of everyone's todos. Bad todo discipline shows up immediately as gaps and conflicts on the calendar.

Where dispatchers create todos

• From a ticket in the agent panel ticket widget — same flow agents use.
• By dragging a ticket onto the dispatch calendar at a specific time slot for a specific agent — fast, visual, covered in a later lesson on drag-and-drop scheduling.
• Via automation — workflows, triage, dispatch, and helpdesk actions can all create todos automatically based on rules your admin configured. You may not have created the todo yourself, but you'll see it on the calendar and the agent will see it on their dashboard.

Tip: Match the todo type to reality. A scheduled todo says "I'm committing this agent to be at this place at this time" — if you're not actually committing, use a floating todo and let the system slot it dynamically. Dispatchers who default everything to scheduled end up with calendars full of artificial commitments that drift constantly.