How to work with it
A practical workflow for using the inbox, projects, issues, cycles, milestones, and goals together
This guide walks through a complete workflow — from capturing a rough thought, all the way to shipping a release. It's opinionated; treat it as a starting point and adapt to your team.
1. Set up a project
Create a workspace, then create a project inside it. Give the project a short identifier (3-5 letters) — issue keys will be prefixed with it (ENG-12, MKT-42).
The project ships with a default set of issue states — Backlog, Todo, In Progress, In Review, Done, Cancelled. Edit them per project: each state has a category (backlog, unstarted, started, completed, cancelled) that drives reporting and "blocked" semantics.
2. Capture things, don't lose them
When something comes in over the day or week — a bug report, a piece of feedback, a half-formed idea — drop it into the workspace Inbox. Inbox items are cheap: a title and a kind (bug / feedback / idea / feature / question). The point is to get it out of your head.
Treat the Inbox as a queue, not a graveyard. Review it weekly: promote what's worth doing into issues, archive the rest.
When an inbox item is ready, hit Promote to issue — pick a project and it becomes an issue there, with the inbox title as a starting point.
3. Define goals before sprints
Before you fill cycles with work, write down what you're actually trying to achieve. A Goal is an outcome (not a task):
- "Reach 1,000 weekly active users by end of Q3" — a goal
- "Add invite-a-friend flow" — an issue that contributes to that goal
Each goal can have key results (measurable sub-outcomes) and link to the issues that contribute. The AI breakdown helper can propose issues from a goal description — accept the ones that fit, commit them in one step.
4. Plan a milestone
A Milestone is "what ships together" — v2.0, the public beta, a Q3 launch. Create one when you have a coherent slice of scope with a target date.
- Add a start and target date so it appears on the timeline.
- Add dependencies on other milestones if order matters — a milestone with an incomplete dependency shows as "Blocked".
- Tag issues with the milestone as they get pulled into scope.
The board view shows per-milestone progress (X/Y issues done). The timeline view is a Gantt chart — drag the bars to move dates, drag the edges to resize.
5. Run cycles
A Cycle is a time-boxed sprint — typically one or two weeks. Cycles are workspace-wide, so one sprint covers every project in your workspace. While milestones answer "what ships", cycles answer "what are we working on right now".
For each cycle:
- Create it from the Cycles page in the sidebar, with a start and end date (e.g. Sprint 12: 2026-05-25 → 2026-06-08)
- Move it from
draft→activewhen it begins - Pull issues into it from any project's backlog
- At the end, mark it
completed
Only one cycle should be active at a time per workspace. The current cycle is highlighted on the Milestones timeline so you can see at a glance which deliverables fall inside the current sprint.
6. Execute on issues
Day-to-day, you live in the Issues board. Issues move left-to-right through the project's states (Backlog → Todo → In Progress → In Review → Done).
For each issue:
- Set a priority (
none,low,medium,high,urgent) - Assign someone
- Optionally set a due date for hard deadlines
- Optionally link it to a cycle (when you're doing it) and a milestone (what it's part of)
The issue key (ENG-12) is stable and can be referenced from commits, PRs, or other tools.
7. The weekly rhythm
A workable cadence:
Monday — Start the cycle
Mark the new cycle active. Review goals; confirm the cycle's issues map to them.
Daily — Open the dashboard
Use the Dashboard as your "Today" view: handle overdue first, work the calendar, glance at goals. Update issue states as you move.
Mid-cycle — Check milestones
Open the Milestones timeline. Are any milestones drifting past their target date? Are any blocked by incomplete dependencies? Reshuffle scope now, not at the end.
Friday — Close the cycle
Mark unfinished issues — push them to next cycle, drop priority, or close as won't-do. Mark the cycle completed. Triage the workspace inbox.
Monthly — Review goals
Open Goals. Update key result progress. Are linked issues actually moving the needle? Adjust or retire goals that no longer make sense.
Mental model summary
| If you're asking... | Look at... |
|---|---|
| What should I do today? | The Dashboard |
| What are we doing right now? | The active Cycle |
| What's shipping in v2.0? | The Milestone |
| Why are we doing this? | The Goal |
| What's the atomic piece of work? | The Issue |
| Something just landed and isn't sorted yet | The Inbox |
Keep these distinctions sharp and the tool stays useful. Blur them — treat every inbox item as an issue, every goal as a milestone — and the planning surface gets noisy fast.