Learn · Planning ahead · 2 min read

Cycles

Some teams work in a steady rhythm: two-week blocks, monthly batches, weekly pushes. Cycles are those blocks. If your team runs Sprints, cycles are Sprints. If you've never heard of a Sprint, a cycle is simply "the work we intend for this stretch of time" — a film crew can run them as shooting weeks.

Cycles are off until you want them; a space without cycles never mentions them.

Setting up

In Space Settings, enable cycles and choose:

• A pattern — weekly, biweekly, monthly, twice-monthly, quarterly.
• A start day, and a name prefix (Sprint, Week, Batch — your word, like everything else).
• How many to generate ahead. Cycles create themselves on schedule from here on; nobody has to remember to "open the next sprint".

Working in cycles

Group the board by cycle: a Backlog column for unassigned work, then a column per cycle, the current one marked. Planning a cycle is dragging items into it — or picking the cycle on the item itself, in the detail panel. The timeline shows cycles as spans above the items.

When a cycle ends, it slides out of view (you choose how many past cycles stay visible) and can be archived. An honest note: items unfinished at the end of a cycle don't move themselves — carrying them into the next cycle is a deliberate drag, on the theory that "we didn't finish this" deserves a moment of attention rather than silent rollover.

What cycles don't do

No velocity charts, no burndown, no story points, no "capacity". A cycle column with items in it tells you what's planned; the same column at the cycle's end tells you what happened. That's the entire reporting layer, and it's deliberate — measuring motion is not the same as making progress.