Follow an item without being assigned to it
Not everyone who cares about an item is the one doing the work. A manager wants to know when a feature ships. A designer wants a heads-up when the item they scoped moves to Started. A bug reporter wants to know when their bug is fixed. None of them need to be an owner. They just want to know what happens next.
Watching solves this. Click the eye icon once and you'll get an email every time something meaningful happens to that item, until you stop watching it.
Watch an item
Open any item and click Watch in the header. The button fills in and becomes Watching. Click it again any time to unwatch.
In compact views (kanban cards, tight list rows), the same toggle appears as just the eye icon: outlined when you're not watching, filled when you are.
Anyone who is a member of a project can watch an item, including Viewers and Stakeholders, not just Owners and Collaborators.
Who's watching
Items with watchers show a small stack of avatars in the header, to the left of the requester's avatar. If nobody is watching, no avatar stack renders. The Watch button is the only thing there.
Owners and Project Leaders can click the watcher stack to open a dropdown and remove other watchers, the same way they manage the owners list.
The Watching view
Every project has a dedicated Watching page, linked from the sidebar. It lists every item you're currently watching, sorted by most recently updated, with an inline unwatch button on each row.
A second tab, Created by me, shows items you created, useful for spotting things you filed but never explicitly clicked Watch on.
Accepted items collapse behind a Show accepted toggle so the list defaults to showing what's still moving. Click it to reveal items you're watching that have already been accepted.
What triggers an email
You'll get an email when a watched item:
- Gets a new comment (the full comment is inline in the email, no need to click through)
- Moves to Started, Finished, Rejected, or Accepted
- Moves to the Icebox
- Is deleted (the email shows the item's last known state, since the item itself is gone)
You never get an email about your own actions. If you're the one who commented or changed the status, watching doesn't notify you about it.
Emails about the same item thread together in Gmail, Outlook, and other clients, so a run of comments and status changes on one item stays in a single conversation instead of flooding your inbox with separate messages.
What watching isn't
Watching is deliberately kept simple:
- It's not the same as being assigned. "My Items" (things you own) and "Watching" (things you follow) are always separate lists. An item can be both, but the two never merge.
- There's no digest. Every event sends its own email, since watching is opt-in and volume stays low.
- There's no unsubscribe link. Manage what you're watching from the item itself or the Watching view. Both are always one click away.
- There's no auto-watch. Being an owner, requester, or commenter doesn't automatically make you a watcher. You have to click Watch.
Via MCP
If you're working with an AI coding assistant connected to GoalPath, ask "what am I watching?" The list_my_watched_items tool returns the same list as the Watching view, across all your projects. It's kept separate from list_my_items ("what's assigned to me") for the same reason the UI keeps them apart: owning and watching are different relationships to an item.