Your first hour

This assumes somebody has handed you a URL and a password, or that you have started an instance yourself. If you would rather poke at a workspace that already has work in it, demo.kolibri.day is exactly that.

The short version

1. Sign in. The first account created on a fresh instance owns it. If you were invited, your link creates the account and drops you into the workspace that invited you.

2. Take the tour, or dismiss it. A first-run tour sets a few things up as it goes — your name, a theme, whether you want email. It is skippable and everything in it is in Settings afterwards.

3. Make a project. Projects → New project in the sidebar. A project needs a name and a key — two to five letters that become the prefix of every task in it, so WEB gives you WEB-1, WEB-2. Pick something you will not mind typing; the key shows up in chat, in commit messages and in search.

4. Put ten real things in it. Not five perfect ones. Press C and type — the whole task fits on one line:

   Redraw the empty state !high @ada #WEB *design due:friday

   That is a title, a priority, an assignee, a project, a label and a due date. The box shows what it understood as chips underneath before you commit to it. See making a task.

5. Move them. Switch the project to Board and drag. The columns are your workflow states, and the + at the right-hand end adds one — most teams find they want a Blocked or a Review within the first week.

6. Start a cycle. Project → Cycles → New cycle. Give it two weeks and drag in what you actually mean to finish. The point of the cycle is the line it draws around a promise; everything else it does — progress, burn-up, the Insights tab — follows from that line existing. See cycles.

7. Write one page. Pages → New page. The decision you just argued about for forty minutes is worth six sentences, and a page is where a task’s description stops being the right place for it. See writing pages.

8. Invite the others. Settings → Members → Invite. Roles are owner, admin, member and guest; members and roles says what each may do.

Turn signup off once everyone is in

An instance that lets anybody create an account is an instance that will eventually have accounts you did not create. Once your team is invited, KOLIBRI_ALLOW_SIGNUP=false closes the door and invites still work. Whoever runs the instance sets that.

What to skip on the first day

Half of this app is worth meeting only when you feel the need for it. In rough order of when that usually happens:

Leave until
Week one	Saved views — the moment you find yourself setting the same three filters twice a day
Week one	Notification settings — the moment the inbox gets noisy
Week two	Modules, if the work has milestones that outlive a cycle
Week two	Custom fields, when a label is clearly being used to store an answer rather than a topic
Week three	Rules, when you notice a thing somebody has to remember to do every time
When it hurts	The timeline, which earns its keep on work with real dependencies and is overhead on work without them

What to do on day two

Check your notification settings before somebody else does. The defaults are conservative — everything lands in the in-app inbox, and email is a batched summary rather than one message per event — but everything still means everything, and how much of it reaches your phone is a per-person setting. Notifications.

Turn on two-factor authentication. Settings → Profile → Two-factor. It gives you recovery codes; put them somewhere that is not the laptop you are sitting at.

Install it. Kolibri is a progressive web app — on a phone, Add to Home Screen; on a desktop browser, the install button in the address bar. That is what makes the offline half useful rather than theoretical. On your phone.