Cycles

A cycle is a view, not a container

This is the part worth understanding first, because everything else follows from it. A task is not inside a cycle the way a file is inside a folder. Its identity, its ID, who can see it, and where its updates go are all unchanged by cycle membership. A cycle is a label the board can filter by, and a task can carry one or none.

Which means there is no /cycles page to visit. The board filtered to a cycle is the cycle page, with the same cards, the same shortcuts and the same drag-and-drop you already use. Projects work the same way, for the same reason.

Work joins the cycle by starting

Moving a task to In Progress or In Review adds it to the current cycle. So does an agent claiming it over MCP. Nobody curates a weekly list, and nothing is missing from the view because someone forgot to file it.

This is the point of cycles in a workspace where agents pick up work unattended: a list a human has to maintain is a list that goes stale the first busy week. A view that fills itself is still true on the busy week.

Releasing a claim does not take the task back out. It was worked this week, and that is the fact the view records.

The week rolls over on its own

At the cycle boundary Masaro completes the expiring cycle and starts the next one. What moves and what stays is the whole design:

• Carried forward: anything still Ready, In Progress or In Review. Unfinished work is this week’s problem too.
• Left behind: anything you moved back to Backlog or Triage during the week. Deprioritising something out of the week means exactly that, and it keeps the finished cycle’s name as the record of the miss.
• Stays put: completed and archived work, which is what makes a past cycle a readable record of what shipped.

If Masaro is down across a boundary, it does not invent the weeks it missed. It closes the cycle that expired and opens one covering today. A cycle that never happened has no history worth faking.

On the board

A slim strip above the columns names the current cycle, its dates and its progress: Cycle 12 · Aug 24–30 · 8/13 done · 21 pts. Beside it, one click filters the board to that cycle.

The filter is also a saved-view dimension, and it stores the active cycle rather than the cycle that happened to be running when you saved it. A view called “This cycle · mine” still means this cycle next Monday.

Task detail carries a cycle field alongside project and epic: None, the current cycle, or the next one. Nothing offers to move a task into a finished cycle, because backdating work into a closed week would falsify the record that cycle exists to keep.

Velocity is shown, never enforced

Once a workspace has completed cycles, the strip can show the average points completed per cycle. It is context for deciding what fits, not a budget: nothing caps what a cycle may hold, and nothing warns you for exceeding it. Tasks with no estimate count as zero, which is why the display always pairs points with a plain count of tasks done.

Settings

Settings → General → Cycles carries three controls: whether cycles are on at all, the length (one to four weeks), and the day the week starts on. Cycles are ON by default in every workspace.

Changing the length or the start day applies from the next cycle. The one running keeps its dates, because reshaping a week that people are already working inside would move a deadline nobody agreed to move.

Turning cycles off hides the strip, the filter and the field, and stops the boundary advancing. It deletes nothing: past cycles are intact, and switching back on picks up from today rather than trying to back-fill the gap.

Boundaries are UTC

A cycle starts at 00:00 UTC on your chosen weekday. There is no per-workspace timezone yet, so a team far from Greenwich sees the week turn over at a local hour that is not midnight. Everything else about the cycle is timezone-free.

Let Masaro draft the week

Everything above is mechanical: work carries forward literally, without judgement. If you want an opinion on it, cycle planning is a scheduled automation that drafts a keep / drop / add diff at each boundary for you to approve or dismiss. It is off until you turn it on, and the mechanical carry-forward stands whether you ever do.