Review Sydekick approvals
How do I review and approve the work Sydekick drafts?
Inbox in the sidebar is where the work your agent has drafted waits for you. Approvals is the tab that needs a decision: Approve sends the draft to be published, and the ✕ beside it rejects one. Neither is a preview — approving is the last point at which anyone reads the draft before it goes out.
What the three tabs hold
Approvals
- Holds
- Finished drafts — posts and review replies — waiting on a yes or no.
- You
- Approve, reject, or reassign to a colleague.
Tasks
- Holds
- Things the agent suggests you do next, which nobody has picked up.
- You
- Start it, hand it to a colleague or back to Sydekick, give it a date, or mark it done.
Insights
- Holds
- Findings — anything it noticed that is not a draft and not a task.
- You
- Read it, turn it into a task, or hand it to Sydekick to act on.
Each badge counts what that tab shows by default, so Approvals is what is genuinely waiting rather than everything ever drafted. In the line beneath it, runs counts the Sydekick sessions and playbook runs behind those items — 480 items from 31 runs means a few routines firing across many locations, which is a queue you can clear in batches.
What happens when you approve or reject
Approve is the go-ahead to publish, not a save — the button's own label is approve and publish. What happens next depends on the draft: where one carries a schedule, the confirmation says so ("Approved — publishing on its schedule"), and where it does not, it goes out. Either way the decision is yours to make once, so whether it actually reached the channel is a separate question — that is the Publish filter further down.
Reject takes the draft out of the pending queue. It stays visible under Status: Rejected alongside who decided it, and the decided views are read-only, so there is no approve button on it there.
If a draft is nearly right, neither button is what you want. Reassign it, or use Tweak all below.
Narrow the queue before you work it
Searching is the fastest way in. It matches a row's own text — the location, the reviewer, the opening of the draft — so a client or location name pulls that client's work out of a long queue in one move. The count updates as you go, and the footer tells you when you are seeing everything rather than a page of it. Sort by reorders the list by Due date, Newest, Client or Type.
The source line under each draft is the one people skip and shouldn't. Sydekick, on schedule · Weekly Local Post Ideas means nobody asked for this — a playbook produced it on its timetable, so that playbook is what to question if the drafts are consistently wrong. Sydekick, asked by a colleague's name means a person requested it in a conversation, and they are worth a word before you reject their work. Sydekick alone means it drafted this without being asked.
Use Other Filters for more options
Most of the controls live behind Other Filters, which is why the queue looks thinner than it is.
Type splits posts from review replies, which need different kinds of attention. Due narrows to Overdue, Today or This week. Group by stacks the list by Sydekick session, Client or Type — session is the useful one when a single run produced fifty near-identical drafts. Choose what you want and select Apply.
Two are worth knowing properly. Status sits on pending approval until you change it, so Approved and Rejected are how you audit decisions after the fact. Publish is deliberately separate from it: a draft can be approved and still have failed to reach the channel. Publish failed is the filter worth checking on a routine, and those rows carry a Why the publish failed explanation with the channel's own reason where it gave one.
Approving several at once
Every row has a checkbox, and the line above the list selects everything currently filtered — so the workflow is filter first, then select all, never select-all on an unfiltered queue. With rows selected you can approve them together, reject them together, or assign them to one person with a note.
Two kinds of row are deliberately left out of a bulk selection, and each says why: one whose last publish attempt failed, and a post with No image. Both need a look on their own. Generate an image on that row makes one — a real image generation, so it spends credits.
Tweak all is the other bulk control. Give Sydekick one instruction — "make them warmer and mention free delivery" — and it rewrites the selected drafts in place, still unpublished, still waiting for your yes. That is the tool for a batch that is off-tone rather than wrong.
The queue loads the 500 most recent items and says when it has hit that ceiling. Filtering is how you reach the rest.
The Client filter may open empty
This is a known problem, not something you have configured wrongly: the summary line counts the clients with work waiting while the Client dropdown beside it opens to No matches. Grouping by client can go the same way, putting every row under Ungrouped.
Until it is fixed, scope by client with the search box instead. That reads the rows themselves, so it works when the dropdown does not.
Watch out for
Questions people ask
I approved something. How do I check it actually went out?
Other Filters → Status → Approved, then apply; each row shows who approved it and when. Whether it reached the channel is the Publish filter in the same panel — Published, Saved as draft, Publish failed and Not published yet are separate from the approval decision.
Fifty drafts came through with almost the same wording. Is that a fault?
No — that is one playbook running across many locations. The queue groups near-identical copy together and tells you how many share the same caption, so you can read one, decide once and select the group. If the wording is wrong for all of them, Tweak all beats rejecting fifty.