OKRs and goals

Objectives and key resultsokrs.html

Tasks are what you are doing this week. OKRs — objectives and key results, sometimes just called goals or targets — are what all that work is supposed to add up to by the end of the quarter. The OKR page is where a team writes those down and watches them move.

Open it from OKRs in the navigation strip at the top of every page, between Team and Messages. It sits there because it is the same product, not a separate one: the same sign-in, the same team, the same people. It is also one of the four places you can choose to land on when you sign in.

There is a second door to the same page. My Work, the first entry in that strip, opens a menu of the individual-first destinations — My tasks, Today, Starred, Notes, Calendar, then My team board, My OKRs and Messages. My OKRs lands on this page, exactly as the OKRs entry does; it is there so that everything you think of as “mine” can be reached from one menu.

The OKRs entry when your team has not switched them on

The OKRs entry is always in the navigation — on Tasks, Notes, Calendar, Team and OKRs alike, and in the View strip on the admin console. OKRs are off until a team admin turns them on, and while they are off the entry takes you to the setting that turns them on rather than to the page: Team settings › Team › Objectives and key results, with the switch already in front of you.

If you are a team admin, flip it and the entry starts opening the OKR page instead. If you are not, you will see the pane without that row — it is a team admin's setting — and you now know exactly what to ask for.

Whose OKRs you are looking at

Two bands above the board. The suite’s navigation on top, the same on every page; the OKR controls under it — the team, the view, the grouping, the layout, the quarter and the search, with the Reports button, the manual and the pin at the right-hand end. There is no gear here any more — OKR settings moved into the menu under your initials. Then the ladder that names the three nouns, and the row of controls that belongs to the list itself.

The page titles itself with the team — Northwind Digital OKRs — and if you are on more than one team a Team dropdown sits in the OKR controls bar, one band below the navigation, at the left of the row that also carries the quarter and the view controls. Choosing another team replaces everything on the page: its objectives, its key results, its quarters and its own health thresholds. On one team there is no dropdown, because there is no choice to make.

The team you pick follows you between the apps. Switch team here, press Team, and you land on that team's board — and coming back to OKRs keeps it. That lasts for as long as the browser tab is open.

A new session starts where you usually work, not where you happened to finish: your default team if you have set one, otherwise the first team you belong to — and the board you last had open on it. The team you last visited is not remembered past the session, on purpose: a short look at another team is not a statement about where you work. Either way it is checked against your current memberships — if you have left a team since, the page falls back rather than opening on something that would refuse you. Set or change your default team in Settings → Workspace → Where you work.

Objectives, key results, and quarters

Three ideas, and it is worth being clear about which is which:

• An objective is the outcome you are going for. It is a sentence, not a number — "make the reporting pipeline something people trust".
• A key result is how you will know you got there. It is always a number that moves: from a start, to a target, by a date.
• A quarter — the app calls it a cycle — is the window. Every objective lives in exactly one, and you switch between them with the quarter dropdown.

An objective with no key results underneath it shows a gray no key results marker. That is deliberate: it is an intention nobody can check, and the app would rather say so than quietly show it as fine.

Objectives can also be filed under an area — whatever your team wants to call it. Areas are optional, and if you do not use them everything simply sits under "Unassigned".

Adding an objective, and its key results

The two forms, side by side here for comparison — in the product the second opens on top of the first. Fields marked optional can be left empty; an objective with no owner is allowed.

1. Choose the quarter you are planning in, from the dropdown at the top.
2. Press New objective.
3. Give it a title, and optionally a line about why it matters, an area, and an owner.
4. Press Create & add key results. The objective is created and the key-result form opens straight onto it, so you do not have to find it again. (Create on its own just makes the objective.)
5. Fill in the start, the target and where it is today. Measured in starts as Percent, which is what most measures are.
6. Press Save & add another for the next one, as many times as you need, then Create on the last.

You can still press Add key result under an objective later — nothing about the old route has changed.

Three to five objectives a quarter is plenty. The page will hold as many as you like, but a list of thirty is a list nobody reads.

Importing straight from Profit.co

If your OKRs live in Profit.co, you do not have to prepare anything. Export from Profit.co, drop the file in exactly as it came — .xlsx or .csv, all of its columns — and this recognizes it and does the mapping for you. No renaming columns, no deleting the ones we do not need, no rebuilding the objective and key-result structure by hand.

1. Open Settings → Bulk changes → Import from a CSV file and drop the export in.
2. It says recognized as a Profit.co export and reads it. Nothing is written yet.
3. Read the summary. It is written in plain English — how many objectives and key results the file holds, how many are new, how many already exist, how many will have missing information filled in, and how many need you to look at them.
4. Open the detail to see, field by field, what is in this application now, what the file says, and what it would become.
5. Press Accept & Import, or Cancel. Cancel writes nothing at all.

Where it cannot be certain, it leaves that record out rather than guessing. If two of your objectives could both be the one in the file, or a key result's objective cannot be worked out, those rows are set aside and named in the summary — it will not merge two objectives because they look alike. Everything else still imports. A handful of rows it cannot place does not hold up the rest of the file; fix them in Profit.co and import again, and what already came in is matched rather than duplicated.

Import history, and running one again

Every import is recorded: when it ran, who ran it, which file, and what it actually did — how many objectives and key results it created, how many records it filled in, and how many rows it set aside. Open it from Import history in the import window. The record is kept on the server, so it is the team's history rather than your browser's; everyone on the team sees the same list.

The rows that could not be imported are listed so you can enter them by hand. Each one shows the objective and key result names, the owner exactly as the file wrote it, the quarter, and the reason it was set aside — enough to re-key the record without opening the spreadsheet again, or to correct the export and run it once more. There is a download button on that list if you would rather work from a file than off the screen.

Open any import to see it row by row, including the rows that were not imported and why, which you can download as a CSV to work from.

Importing a quarter from a spreadsheet

If the quarter is already planned in a spreadsheet, you do not have to retype it. Open OKR settings… — in the menu under your initials, at the top right — go to Bulk changes, and press Import from CSV… under Import from a CSV file. It sits with the other operations that change a lot of objectives at once.

1. Press Download a template CSV. It has every column this understands and two example rows filled in with your team’s real area, quarter and owner, so the file works before you change anything.
2. Replace the example rows with your own. One row per key result. Repeat the objective’s title on each of its rows and they become one objective; a row with an objective and no key result creates the objective on its own.
3. Drag the file onto the drop zone, or press Choose a file. A spreadsheet is read as it is — .xlsx as well as .csv — so you no longer have to Save as CSV first. The file is recognized by what is inside it rather than by its name, so a workbook someone renamed .csv, or a CSV someone renamed .xlsx, both still arrive as what they actually are.
4. The next screen shows what it thinks each of your columns is. Column names do not have to match ours: it guesses from the headings, and you can correct any of them from the dropdown beside it.
5. Check the three counts — ready, needs attention and cannot be imported — then press Import. Nothing is written until you do.

Rows that cannot be imported are left out, and every one of them says why on its own line. The three that come up most often:

• “is not on this team” — the owner is somebody your team does not have. This does not stop the row: it comes in unassigned, with a comment recording who owned it. Add that person to the team and import again to assign it to them, or choose Do not import this person in the preview if the name should not be recorded at all.
• “this team has no quarter called…” — add the quarter under OKR settings → Quarters and import again.
• “a key result needs a target” — every measure needs something to be measured against.

Every import is recorded, so what one did is not only on the screen you were looking at when it ran. Press Import history in the import window to read what any of them did, row by row, and to take one back off the board — see Import history, and running one again.

What an objective's line tells you

One objective, opened. The diamond is the objective and the circles are its key results — and only the one in trouble is colored, so the eye lands on it. The objective takes the worst of them for its marker and the plain average for its 26%, which is why a red diamond can sit beside a completed measure.

Under the title: the area, the owner, the quarter or quarters it covers, and how many key results it has. The period is worked out from the measures themselves, so an objective with measures in Q3 and Q4 reads 2026 Q3–Q4; one with no measures yet shows the quarter it was planned in.

On the right: its status and its percentage.

Its outline takes its color from that same status — the same color as the dot beside its title — so a struggling objective stands out in the list before you even open it.

The objective's own actions

Open an objective and its key results appear underneath it, each in a card of its own. Below the last one is a bordered Objective actions panel, set apart from the key results above it so the objective's own controls no longer read as one more measure's row. It is the same panel wherever you open the objective — in List and in Kanban's card dialog alike, because both draw it from the same place.

History lists title, owner, state, area and quarter changes, which key results joined or left the roll-up, every check-in on those key results, and any date that moved — each line names who made the change and an exact, zoned timestamp, not a relative one that goes stale. Entries are newest first, grouped under the day they happened, and a line about a key result says which one. It reads “No history recorded yet” the same calm way for an objective with nothing recorded as for one whose trail has not started — either way, nothing is broken.

Under the buttons: who filed the objective and when, and its Insight — both visible without a click. They used to be folded sections you had to open first; the owner's report was that the objective's own facts were getting lost under the key results, so they no longer hide behind one.

Reading the health colors

An objective is a diamond and a key result is a circle, so you can tell the two apart at a glance while you are reading down a list. A task linked to a measure is a small square.

Every objective carries a colored marker. The color is not somebody's opinion — it is worked out from how far along you are compared with how far through the quarter it is, and it is expressed in days.

A key result is only colored when it needs attention. Behind and Slightly behind keep their color; on track, ahead, complete and not started render in a quiet gray. An objective with six measures used to paint six markers and six bars in six different colors, which drowned out the objective's own verdict — the thing you are actually looking for. Color now means “look at this”. Hovering any marker still names its state, whatever the color.

If a key result is halfway to its target and the quarter is halfway through, it is on track. If the quarter is halfway through and you are a quarter of the way there, you are about three weeks behind the clock, and it turns amber.

Changing where the bands fall

Open OKR settings → Your defaults and look for Health signal: that is the scale the colors come from. The numbers on the handles are days from the quarter clock, not percentages — 0 means exactly on schedule, and a positive number means that many days late. Halfway through the quarter at 20% is about 27 days behind; the same 20% in the first week is ahead. The panel lists what each color covers as you move the handles.

Drag a handle, click anywhere on the track to move the nearest one, or use the arrow keys — Shift moves faster, Home and End jump to the ends. The colors on the board update when you let go.

This is your setting, stored with your other preferences, and it is kept per team — teams manage progress differently, and one team’s judgment about what “behind” means should not become another’s. Changing it does not change what anyone else sees.

Writing a good key result

A key result needs three numbers: where it started, where it is now, and where it needs to get to. Pick a measured in type so it displays sensibly:

• Number — a count. Add a unit like "sites" or "customers" if it helps.
• Percent — shown with a % sign.
• Currency — shown as $2.5k or $3.2M.
• Done / not done — for the ones that either happened or did not.

The target can be lower than the start. "Reduce p95 latency from 800ms to 200ms" measures exactly the same way — progress is how far you have moved from the start toward the target, whichever direction that is.

Start and target have to differ, though. If they are the same there is nothing to measure, and the app will say so rather than show a meaningless bar.

Quarters and due dates

An objective sits in a quarter. Each key result has its own quarter, which starts as the objective's — an objective set in Q3 often has measures landing in Q4, and forcing them all into one quarter makes every roll-up wrong.

The due date is filled in from the quarter: pick 2026 Q3 and it becomes 30 September 2026. Change the quarter and the date moves with it. If you set a date yourself, it is kept — changing the quarter will not overwrite a date you chose deliberately.

A key result cannot be saved without a due date. Without one there is nothing for the health colors to measure against, so it could never be behind.

Moving an objective to a different quarter

Because a key result carries its own quarter, changing the objective's quarter does not move its measures with it. So when you change it and there are key results sitting in the quarter you are leaving, the page asks before saving:

It counts the real measures and names the real quarters, including when they are spread across more than one. Move them is chosen for you, because that is usually what a quarter change means — but both answers are real. A measure you genuinely finished in the old quarter should stay there as history, which is why this asks instead of moving them silently.

You are only asked when there is something to ask about. No dialog if the quarter has not changed, if the objective has no key results, or if none of them are in the quarter being left. Archived measures are not counted or moved — they are already outside what the page means by “this objective's key results” everywhere else.

If you choose Leave them and every measure ends up in a different quarter from the objective, the objective will read Not scored this quarter in the quarter it now sits in. That is expected, not a problem — see Reading the health colors.

Checking in on progress

Press Check in on any key result. Enter where the number is now, optionally say how confident you feel and what changed, and save.

A check-in does two things: it moves the key result, and it leaves a dated note of who reported what. That history is the part people value next quarter, when someone asks why a number moved the way it did.

The check-in box tells you what the quarter clock expects by today, so you can see immediately whether the number you are about to enter is good news.

Seeing at a glance who has checked in

Beside a key result's numbers — and beside an objective's status and percentage — a quiet Check-in 2 says how many check-ins there have been. An objective's number is the total across its key results, since a check-in always belongs to a measure rather than to the objective itself.

It counts the quarters you are looking at, not all of history. Filter to 2026 Q3 and it counts the check-ins recorded during Q3; add Q2 and it counts both. The number changes as you change the filter, without a reload.

A check-in belongs to the quarter it was recorded in, which is not always the quarter its key result is planned for. A measure planned for Q4 that somebody updated in September counts toward Q3, because that is when the update happened. This matters most at a quarter boundary, and it is the honest answer to “did anyone touch this during the period I am reviewing?”

Nothing is shown when the count is zero. The point of the marker is to find the measures somebody HAS reported on — a row of “Check-in 0” labels would bury exactly what you are scanning for.

Press it and it takes you to the check-ins. On a key result it opens that measure's details and expands its check-in history. On an objective it opens the objective and expands every key result that has check-ins in the period — all of them, not just the first, because the count you pressed was the total.

Telling somebody about it

Type @ in the note to mention anybody on any of your teams — they get it in their Messages panel, with a count on the button, the same inbox that carries task mentions. Start typing a name and the list narrows; arrow keys move, Enter picks. The @ works in an objective's or a key result's Comments too.

A check-in that mentions somebody also posts its note as a comment, and the box tells you so before you save. That is how the people you named have something to open: a check-in is a number and a date, and the comment thread is where a remark can actually be read. A check-in that mentions nobody stays a check-in and posts nothing.

You can mention anybody in the team that owns the OKR, and nobody else — that is who can read its comments. Somebody in another of your teams is not offered, because a message they could never open is not a message.

Formatting a comment

The comment box has formatting controls above it — the same bar the task and note comment boxes have. Bold, italic, underline and strikethrough, bulleted and numbered lists, text size, color and highlight, a link, clear formatting, and undo and redo. It is on the Comments box of an objective and of a key result, in both the list and the objective panel. On a narrow window the controls that do not fit fold into More formatting rather than disappearing, and every one of them has a keyboard route: Tab reaches the bar, and the usual shortcuts work inside the box.

Comments written before the bar arrived read exactly as they always did. Nothing was reformatted, and a comment in which somebody typed angle brackets on purpose still shows those characters rather than turning into markup.

A comment is still capped at 4,000 characters, and the cap counts what you typed rather than the formatting around it — making a sentence bold does not use up any of it. The box tells you how much room is left as you approach the limit, and says how far over you are if you go past it.

The check-in note is deliberately plain. "What changed" on a check-in, and the short box that appears when you move a measure, take text only. A check-in note is part of the measurement — it sits beside the number in the history — rather than a message in a conversation, so it has no formatting bar. Mentioning somebody in one still posts it as a comment, exactly as before.

Moving the bar offers a check-in for you. Drag a measure or type its number and it saves at once; a short check-in box then appears underneath asking what changed. Write a sentence and it joins the history, exactly as pressing Check in does.

Connecting tasks to a key result

This is what keeps OKRs from becoming a separate world. Open a key result, press Linked work, then Link a task, and pick from your own open tasks. The key result then shows how much real work is pointing at it, and each linked task opens straight into Tasks.

Only tasks you own can be linked. That is deliberate — otherwise anyone could attach somebody else's private task to a shared objective and put it in front of the whole team.

Unlinking removes the connection only. It never deletes, completes or changes the task itself.

The Overview dashboard

The Overview tab steps back from this quarter to the whole picture. Everything on it is clickable, and takes you into the objectives list scoped to exactly what you clicked.

• OKRs by area, by quarter — a grid of the areas against the quarters you have filtered to, showing the average progress across each cell's objectives. The ring beside each figure is a different reading: it draws the mix of health beneath the cell, so a cell can be early in its progress while what exists is on track. Future quarters show how much is planned instead, because nothing has had a chance to slip yet. It has a chooser of its own as well, for cutting it down further just to share: see The grid shows the period you have chosen and Narrowing the grid further.
• Readiness — what next quarter looks like today: how many objectives are drafted, how many have no key results yet, how many are already showing progress, how many areas are represented. Objectives planned, Objectives without key results and Already underway each open the list narrowed to exactly what they counted, with a Clear control above the list so you can see the scope and leave it in one click. Key results drafted counts measures rather than objectives, so it opens the same planned-objectives list with a note explaining why. Areas represented is a ratio rather than a selection, so it switches the list to Group by area instead of filtering it.
• Earlier quarters — a banner listing work that rolled past its quarter without anyone deciding to finish it, move it, or drop it. Each one needs a decision.
• Data hygiene — small clean-ups that keep the other numbers honest. This card disappears when there is nothing to fix, which is the point.

The grid shows the period you have chosen

The filters at the top of the page decide what this grid is made of. Set Period to 2026 Q2 and 2026 Q3 and the grid has two columns — the quarters you are not looking at are not drawn at all. Pick an Area and it has one row, that area’s. Leave either one alone and every quarter, or every area, is drawn.

So the grid is not a map of everything with your filter highlighted on it; it is the filter, laid out as a table. What you see is what you have asked for, which is what makes it worth sharing.

• All quarters — every quarter gets a column. Nothing has been narrowed, so nothing is left out.
• One quarter — one column. That is the whole grid.
• Several quarters — a column each, oldest first, however many you picked.
• An area — one row, and the All areas total underneath is dropped, because a total of one row is that row written twice.

Work outside the period is counted, not silently dropped. A line under the chooser says how many objectives sit outside the quarters you have selected and how many other quarters they are in, with a Show every quarter button that widens the period. It only appears when there really is something outside it.

The blue is the status you are hunting

There is still one thing the columns cannot say, and that is what the blue is for now. Press one of the snapshot tiles — 11 behind, 1 slightly behind — and the squares holding that work go blue. An area with none of it stays plain, so you can see at a glance where the eleven are. Press the tile again to clear it.

A status cannot be answered by dropping a column the way a quarter can: a quarter with three behind objectives among twenty is genuinely in your period and genuinely worth drawing. So it is shown by color instead, and the line under the heading says which status the blue is about. With no status chosen there is no blue at all, because every square on the grid is already in your filter — that is what the columns mean.

• An empty square is drawn whether or not you are hunting a status — the quarter is in your period, there is simply nothing in it — but it never goes blue, because a square holding none of what you asked for is not an answer.
• The quarter containing today is still labeled now under its heading. It is a label and not a selection; it does not change what is drawn.
• If none of the squares on screen holds the status you picked, the card says so rather than leaving you hunting for blue that is not there.
• Nothing is hidden by the color: every square keeps its percentage and its status ring, hovering still outlines the one you are pointing at, and the tooltip says in words what the blue means, so it is never color alone.

Narrowing the grid further, just for a screenshot

The filters at the top already decide the grid’s rows and columns. Inside the card there is a second, smaller control — Areas and quarters shown — with a summary beside it saying what is on screen, Showing all 8 areas · all 2 quarters. Open it and you get a chip for every area and every quarter the filters above have left. Press one to take that row or column out of the grid; press it again to bring it back.

Why both? Because they cost different things. Changing the Period at the top re-narrows the objectives list, the totals and the digest with it — you lose the view you were working in. This one changes the picture and nothing else. “I am working in Q2 and Q3 and I want to screenshot Q3 on its own” is a sentence only this control can say.

It cannot widen anything. It only ever narrows what is already there, so it can never bring back a quarter the Period has excluded. For that, change the Period — or press Show every quarter on the line above.

• Where the filter above has already decided, this one steps aside. Pick a single quarter at the top and there is no row of quarter chips here — there is nothing left to choose. Pick an area and the area chips go the same way. Narrow both and the control disappears entirely.
• Take every chip off an axis and the whole axis comes back. Nothing selected means everything, the same way All quarters does in the filter above, so you can never end up looking at an empty grid.
• The totals row renames itself. It reads All areas while every area is showing and Selected areas once you have narrowed it, and the figure follows — it totals the rows you can actually see. A number covering eight areas under a grid showing three is not something the person you sent the picture to could reconcile. Narrow all the way down to one row and the total is dropped, because a total of one row is that row written twice.
• All areas and All quarters inside the panel put one axis back; Show all areas and quarters, beside the summary, puts both back. Neither appears while there is nothing to undo.

Nothing here is remembered. Open the page tomorrow, or refresh it, and the grid is back to the full period again. That is deliberate, and it is the opposite of how the rest of the board behaves: a narrowing quietly restored a week later would have this card under-reporting with nothing on screen to say why. Composing the view again is one gesture, in front of a control you can see. The Period and Area filters at the top are remembered, as they always were — that is the difference between an arrangement and a screenshot.

The wheel is a filter

The ring beside the totals is not just a picture. Click a colored segment and the list filters to that status — exactly as if you had clicked the Behind or Ahead card next to it. Click the same segment again to clear it.

Click the number in the middle to clear the status filter and see everything again. It clears only the status: the area, owner and quarter you had chosen stay as they were, so the number in the middle is always the count you get.

It works the same in List and in Kanban, and you can reach it from the keyboard — tab to a segment and press Enter.

Shortening the list: finished work, and your own

Two tickboxes sit beside the sort above the list. Hide completed takes every objective that is complete out of it. Assigned to me leaves only the objectives you own, or that have a key result you own — both, deliberately: an objective owned by a director with its measures spread across the people doing the work would be missing from a list of “objectives I own”, and that is the commonest shape on a real board. A key result somebody archived does not count.

Both work the same in List and in Kanban.

They last for the session, not for ever. Tick one, refresh, follow a link and come back — it is still ticked. Come back tomorrow and the board opens showing everything. That is deliberate: hiding half your board one afternoon should not quietly hide it every morning after, with a tickbox that looks like a fresh default and nothing on screen to explain where the work went.

It shortens the list and nothing else. The totals along the top — the ring, and the COMPLETED card — keep counting everything, so the page still tells you how much is done while showing you what is not. The area, owner and quarter dropdowns keep offering everything too, so an area whose work is all finished does not quietly disappear from the filter.

And if you do want to see the finished ones, click the COMPLETED card : asking for them outright wins over the checkbox, so you get the completed objectives rather than an empty list.

Pinning the header so the objectives scroll under it

The pin button at the top right of the OKR Snapshot header — in the OKR controls bar, not the navigation above it — keeps that whole block — the title, the filters, the totals and the OBJECTIVES row of controls — fixed at the top of the window while you scroll through the objectives underneath it. Press it again to unpin, and the page scrolls as one again.

It is useful when you are working down a long list and want the filters and the counts to stay where you can see them — you can change the area or the quarter without scrolling back to the top, and the totals update in front of you.

The pin is saved with your account, so the page opens the way you left it on any computer, and it works the same in both layouts. On a short window the pinned header will scroll within itself rather than take the screen away from the objectives it belongs to.

Two layouts: List and Kanban

The LAYOUT switch beside By area / By status chooses how the objectives are drawn. Both show exactly the same objectives — every filter, the search box and the sort apply identically. Only the presentation changes, and switching is instant because nothing is re-read.

In Kanban each card carries a progress bar, with its percentage right beside it on the same line. A narrow card leads with the status diamond in front of the title and states the status in words at the start of the line underneath — Behind · 3 key results — instead of a pill on a row of its own; give the card room (one area on a wide screen is one wide card) and it lays out as the List row does, with the pill back and the owner named. Either way the status is written out, never left to the color of the diamond alone. In List there is no bar on the objective row — the row already carries a status dot, a status pill and the percentage, and every key result underneath draws a bar of its own, so a fourth marker spanning the full width made a list of twenty read as a wall. Open an objective and its measures show their bars, which is where the measuring actually happens.

The bars fill from zero when the board loads and whenever you arrive somewhere new — a different tab, a different layout, a filter — and stay put when you are simply editing. An objective with no key results yet shows an empty bar, because there is nothing measuring it.

Which one you choose is remembered — for you, on any computer. Come back tomorrow, refresh, sign out and back in, and you get the layout you left. It is your preference, not the team's: choosing Kanban does not change what anyone else sees. Changing team, quarter, filters, the search or the sort never changes it back.

These two were called Row and Column until August 2026. Nothing about them changed except the names — if you had chosen Column you are still on Kanban, and you do not need to set it again.

Kanban: reading an area card

Kanban: one card per area, its health above its objectives. The counts are buttons — press 2 behind and the whole board narrows to those. Objectives with no area of their own gather under Unassigned.

The areas share the page. Two areas take half the width each, three take a third, and so on — the columns grow to fill the window rather than sitting at a fixed size. Once a column would get too narrow to read, the next area starts a new row instead. The list head above tells you how many areas are on screen.

A wide column reads like the List view. Objective cards adapt to the width they actually get, which depends on how many areas are on screen — not on the size of your window. Give a column room and its objectives lay out exactly as List draws them: the status diamond, the title, and underneath it area · owner · quarter · N key results, with the status and the percentage on the right. Wider still and each one adds what its measures actually say (“2 behind · 1 on track”) — the one thing the List row has no room for.

As the column narrows the line gives up its parts from the left — the area, then the owner, then the quarter — until only the key-result count is left and the card returns to its compact form: status and owner on top, then the title, then the percentage with its bar. Nothing is lost; it is all there in the objective when you open it.

An area card reads top to bottom in the order the question is usually asked:

• The area, and how much is in flight.
• Its health, as counts — 6 behind · 2 slightly behind · 2 on track. A status with nothing in it is not shown, so the header stays short. Press a count to filter the whole board to it; press it again to clear.
• A thin bar showing the shape of the area at a glance.
• Then the objectives, each a compact card: status, owner's initials, the objective, how far along it is, and how many key results sit behind it.

So you can tell which area is in trouble without reading a single objective — which is the whole point of the layout.

Click an objective card to open it in a dialog — large, sized to your window, with its key results and all their controls: check in, edit, linked work, comments, details. It is the same objective the List layout draws, in the same kind of dialog the task editors use, because a key result needs more room than a card has. Click the same card again, press Close, or press Escape to put it away. One objective is open at a time.

Editing a key result opens on top of it. The editor sits above the objective, takes the keyboard and Escape while it is there, and closing it puts you back on the objective you were reading — you never lose your place.

The dialog is as tall as the objective needs and no taller. Three key results and a folded insight give you a small dialog; expand the insight or add measures and it grows. Once it would run past the bottom of your window it stops there and the content scrolls inside it — the objective's own title, area, owner, quarter and percentage stay pinned at the top while you read down, and so does Close. Fold the insight again and the dialog shrinks back.

Checking in, editing or opening a comment inside a long objective keeps your place — you are not thrown back to the top each time.

A large area shows its first few objectives and offers View all N objectives — otherwise one busy area would fill the screen and defeat the comparison. How many is yours to set: open Settings › Your defaults and change Kanban items per column. It takes any whole number from 3 to 20 and starts at 4, which is about what fits on a laptop screen without one card owning the page. Like the rest of Your defaults it is remembered for good — refresh, navigate away, sign out and back in, and it is still there — and it is yours alone, not the team's. (Which layout you are currently in is different: that lasts the session. Open in Kanban, in the same pane, is what decides which one you start in.)

The number you set is the number you get. An area holding more shows exactly that many and offers View all N objectives with how many are behind it; pressing that unfolds the whole column. It opens that area for as long as you are on the page, never changes your setting, and Show the first N puts it back. While a search or a filter is active nothing is compacted: anything still on screen is something you asked for, so it is shown — a match is never hidden behind View all.

Click an area name to fold it into a narrow strip. The name turns on its side and the count stays, so you can still see what it is — and the width it gives up goes to the areas beside it, exactly the way a folded swim lane works on the team board. If there was a second row, a card from it moves up into the space. Click the strip to open it again.

Folding is remembered for as long as you are signed in, and no longer. Refresh the page or go to Tasks and come back and the areas you folded are still folded; sign in tomorrow and everything is open again. Folding a card away while you work through a board is not the same as saying how you like to read every board.

Grouped By status, every card is one health band, so a per-status tally would just repeat the card's own name. The header shows how many objectives and key results sit under it instead.

Finding things

The controls along the top all narrow the same list, and they combine:

• By area / By status chooses how the list is grouped.
• The area, owner and quarter fields filter it, and all three let you tick more than one — closed, each reads what is chosen ("CTO Office, Product +1") rather than a bare count, and ticking nothing is the same as ticking everything: All areas or Any owner.
• Owner → Unassigned is how you find work nobody has picked up, and it is one more row to tick alongside any names you have already chosen. It matches an objective whose owner is empty or which has any key result with no owner — an objective with an owner and three unassigned measures is exactly what you are looking for. If somebody you had ticked leaves the team, they drop out of the pick on their own rather than leaving you with an empty list and no explanation.
• Select all and Deselect all sit above the list in both the Area and Owner fields. On Owner, where a real team can run well past what fits in the panel, a search box above the rows lets you type a name instead of scrolling — Area does not offer one, because no team has enough areas to need it. Typing only hides rows that do not match; it never changes what is ticked, so narrowing to "dav" and then clearing the box brings back everyone you had already chosen along with everyone else. The moment you type something, Select all and Deselect all relabel themselves Select all shown and Deselect all shown and act only on the rows the search left visible, so a bulk press while narrowed can never reach a name currently off-screen.
• Sort, at the head of the list, orders objectives by how complete they are — least first or most first. It sorts within each group, so the areas stay in their own order and the statuses stay worst-first. An objective with no key results has no percentage, so it sorts last either way rather than pretending to be 0%.
• The six status cards are toggles — press Behind to see only those, press it again to clear.
• Search matches objective titles, descriptions, key results, areas and owner names. Press Escape to clear it.
• Clear all appears whenever a filter is active.

The status cards always count the whole area-and-search selection, not the slice you have drilled into — so you can always see what you are filtering out, and get back.

The page remembers how you left it

Two different things, kept apart on purpose. How you read the board is remembered for good; what you happen to have open on it is remembered only while you are signed in.

A fresh session opens with every band and area expanded and every objective closed — all of the work in view, none of the detail, so you choose what to open rather than scrolling past what you opened yesterday. (If you would rather see the key results straight away, tick Expand objectives automatically in Your defaults. That decides how the board opens; once you have folded or unfolded anything yourself, what you did stands for the rest of the session.)

So refresh the page, or go to Tasks and come back, and the board is exactly as you left it. Sign out and back in, or come in tomorrow, and it opens at your defaults again. Filtering to one area and expanding three objectives while you work through a review is where you were at the time; it is not a statement about how you like to read every board, and having yesterday's half-finished review waiting for you is not helpful.

If you always want to start somewhere other than the plain objectives list, that is what Your defaults is for. Tick Open in Kanban and the page opens on the area columns every time; you can still switch to List while you work and it will be back in Kanban tomorrow. The same goes for the Overview and for grouping by area.

Which team you were last looking at is remembered for good — that is which board you work on, not how you had it arranged — and it is checked against your current membership each time, so a team you have left is never restored.

There are two pairs of these, and each one says what it acts on. Expand areas and Collapse areas, at the top of the list, fold the groups — the bands in List, the cards in Kanban. Expand objectives and Collapse objectives, on their own line just under Sort, open the key results underneath every objective in view.

The first pair renames itself to match how you are grouping: Expand areas when you are grouped By area, Expand bands when you are grouped By status, because those are the things on screen to fold. They read Expand all and Collapse all until August 2026, which said nothing about what would happen and sat a centimetre from a pair that looked almost the same.

Neither changes meaning depending on what is already open — that is why each is two buttons rather than one toggle — and both act on what is currently in view, so an objective a filter has excluded is left alone rather than waiting for you expanded when you clear the filter. The objective pair is a List control: in Kanban the key results live in the objective's own dialog, so there is nothing on the board for it to open and it is not shown.

A group folded in one layout is folded in the other. Which objective's dialog you had open in Kanban is not remembered at all, not even for the session — that is what you were reading at that moment, not how you arranged the page.

One more thing worth knowing: signing out clears all of this deliberately, which also means the next person to sign in on that computer does not inherit how you had the board set up.

The search box is deliberately not remembered. A search is a question you are asking now, not a way you have arranged the page — coming back to a filtered list with no memory of why it was filtered is worse than starting clean.

If a quarter you were viewing is deleted, or an objective you had open is archived, the page falls back to something real rather than showing you an empty screen.

Exporting the board, or printing it

The Reports button in the OKR controls bar — just before the manual, and the hairline and the pin after it — opens a short menu. Choose Current View and it builds a plain, printable report and hands it to your browser’s print dialog, where Save as PDF is the usual destination. It is meant for a quarterly review, a leadership update or a board pack: something you can give to somebody who does not open the application. (The menu’s other choice, By Member, is a different document about one person’s own work — see below.)

The dialog tells you what is going in before it builds anything. The Executive digest block is absent altogether when you have no AI assistant set up.

It exports what is on the page, and says so

The report is of the board you are looking at, not of everything the team has. Every filter that was standing when you pressed the button is honoured — the quarter, the area, the owner, the health drill-down, the search box, Hide completed and Assigned to me. The dialog counts the objectives for you before it builds anything, so you can see whether you meant to narrow it that far.

And the front page of the report says what was left out. Each narrowing is printed as a labeled line — Period, Area, Owner, Health, Search, Scope, Completed work — so the person you hand it to can check “was this only their own objectives?” without asking you. An export that quietly dropped half a board would be worse than no export at all, because nothing about it would look wrong.

What is in the document

A cover with the team’s name, the period and the counts; then the digest if you asked for one; then At a glance, Health and By area; then the work, by area and quarter — every objective with its progress and health, and its key results underneath. Two tick boxes shorten it: turn off Include each objective’s key results for a summary, or Include the health and by-area breakdowns to go straight from the cover to the detail.

The digest is written by your assistant; the numbers are not

Every figure in the document is computed by the application from your team’s own check-ins. The report says so in its footer, and it is the important sentence on this page. If you ask for an executive digest, an AI assistant writes the prose over figures that were worked out before it was asked — it is handed those numbers and told it may not calculate one of its own, and every figure it is allowed to mention is printed on the page underneath the paragraph, where you can check it.

It is given no names. The facts that go to the assistant carry objective titles and numbers and no person at all.

The digest is not saved to the board, so writing one over a filtered export cannot overwrite the quarter digest the Overview keeps. Where your export is not narrowed — the whole of the period — the digest the Overview has already written describes exactly this population, so it is offered as it stands, with its own timestamp, and nothing is sent anywhere.

One person’s report card

Press the same Reports button described above and choose the menu’s second option, By Member, for a document about one person’s own work over whatever period you choose, rather than about the board as a whole. (The menu’s other choice, Current View, is the printable report described above.)

The chevron sits right beside the report icon. If your team has not set this feature up, the menu simply offers the one item it always has.

Choosing who, and what period

Picking By Member opens a small dialog. Type a name or an email address to find someone — the list is everyone on the team you currently have open, the same team the board itself is showing.

For the period, four buttons cover the usual choices — This quarter, This year, Last 4 quarters and Custom — and a small grid lets you tick individual quarters directly: years run down the side, newest first, and the four quarters of each year run across. A quarter nobody has started yet is shown but cannot be picked; typing a date, or ticking a quarter by hand, switches the period to Custom automatically so what is selected and what the buttons say can never disagree. The dialog also tells you roughly how much the range covers before you run it, so you can see you have not picked something far narrower — or wider — than you meant to.

You can only run your own — unless you administer the team

An ordinary team member can only build a report about themselves. The person field simply will not let you choose anyone else. If you administer the team, you can build one for anyone on it. This is checked again, in full, every single time a report is opened — including if someone sends you a link straight to one — so it is never something a locked field is merely hinting at.

What the report contains

The report opens as a page of its own, not a download, so you can read it, refresh it, or come back to it before deciding whether to keep it. It has two parts:

• Objectives this person owns. Every one of them for the period you picked, with all of their key results underneath — even a key result somebody else on the team happens to hold, because the person you asked about is accountable for the whole objective, not only their own piece of it.
• Key results this person owns on somebody else’s objective. Grouped under that objective’s title, with its owner, area, team and period shown for context. This is why you may sometimes see an objective on the report that this person does not own at all — only their own measure under it is included, never the rest of that objective’s key results.

Between the two, this is a complete picture of everything the person is accountable for, whether or not they happen to own any objectives themselves. If they own none at all, the second part is where their whole record lives.

The period you choose is exactly what you get — every quarter it touches, including one where nothing happened, is shown, and nothing on the page is qualified by whatever filters happen to be standing on the board behind it. That is different from the board export above, which deliberately prints the filters it was run under; a report over a stated date range has none to print.

If the person’s work spans more than one team, the report says so and labels each objective with its own team — it is not limited to the team you had open when you started, only the list of people you could choose from was.

Every quarter on the page states its own year and quarter number, and a quarter that has already finished is described as it stood at the end of that quarter, with the date printed beside it — not as it happens to read today, months later. There is no score, grade, or ranking anywhere on the page: every average shown is a plain mean, and it always says how many things it was averaged over.

Asking about somebody with no work at all in the period you chose still gives you a real page — their name and the period are printed, it is simply empty — rather than a blank screen you would have to guess the meaning of.

Sharing it

While a report is open, the address bar updates to point at it. You can copy that link and send it to a colleague; when they open it, the same who-can-see-whom check runs again for them, so a link only ever works for someone who was allowed to run that report themselves.

Printing it, or saving it as a PDF

Inside the report, Print or save PDF opens a printing step without leaving the report itself. It shows a preview of exactly what will print, alongside a short set of choices, before anything reaches your printer.

The three Include switches and the paper size all update the preview immediately, so you can see what you are about to print before you print it.

Neither button generates a file by itself. Both Save as PDF and Print simply open your browser’s own print dialog — they differ only in which destination is already chosen for you when it opens, printer or PDF. This application does not create the PDF; your browser does, the same way it would for any page you chose to print. Whichever one you press, you stay on this step afterwards rather than being sent anywhere else, so you can change something and try again.

Choose Letter or A4 before printing; the preview reflows to match. The three tick boxes shorten the document the same way they do for the board export — turn off Key result tables for a summary of just the objectives, or Area breakdown to leave it out entirely. Page break per quarter, off by default, starts a fresh page for every quarter shown rather than letting them run together.

Every printed page repeats the person’s name and the period at the top and a timestamp at the bottom, so a single page handed to somebody, on its own, still says whose record it is and when it was produced. The health label on each measure prints as an outlined box with its own word in it, never as a color alone — so it still reads correctly if you print in black and white. And whatever you folded closed or left open while reading the report on screen makes no difference to what prints: every key result under an objective is on the page, open or not.

OKR settings

Two ways in, and the second one is new. The usual route is OKR settings… in the menu under your initials, at the top right. There is also a link from Configure team… → OKRs → OKR access, for when you are already in there deciding who may use OKRs and want the areas and quarters next. That link takes you to the OKRs page itself and opens settings on Areas — it does not open a second window inside the one you are in. It appears only if OKRs are switched on for the team and only for a team admin, because there would be nothing for it to show you otherwise.

Four tabs. Each pane carries its own heading above a short explanation, then a smaller heading over the list itself — Areas here — with the row that adds a new one directly beneath it and the existing rows below that. The Quarters tab is laid out the same way; see Quarters for why its own pane heading no longer matches its tab. Bulk changes is shown to anybody who has something to do in it, and each row in it carries its own gate rather than the tab carrying one for all of them: Import from CSV… is there for everybody, and the bulk owner change is a team admin's. Running the import is a Super Team Admin's — see the note under Importing a quarter from a spreadsheet.

OKR settings… is in the menu under your initials, at the top right, directly below Configure team… if you administer a team and below My settings if you do not. (It used to be a gear in the OKR controls bar. A gear between a question mark and a download arrow is three unlabeled circles in a row, so it is a named line in the menu now, where every other door marked settings in this suite already is. It opens exactly the same dialog.) Four tabs, the fourth being Bulk changes — which appears for anybody who has a row to use in it, not for team admins only.

Areas

Areas are what By area groups objectives by, and what the area dropdown filters on — so until you add some, everything sits under Unassigned.

The pane opens on its own heading, Portfolio areas, with a short explanation underneath. Below that is a smaller heading, Areas, over the list itself — and beneath THAT heading, before the rows, is the row that adds a new one: type a name and press Add.

Each row shows how many objectives are filed under it this quarter. Deleting an area does not delete its objectives — they simply become Unassigned, and the app tells you how many before you confirm.

Areas are shared by the whole team, so only a team admin can change them. Everyone else sees the list without the controls.

Quarters

Every objective lives in one quarter. The current one is created for you the first time somebody opens the page; add the next one here before planning starts, so there is somewhere to put it. Open jumps the page to that quarter.

The tab you press to get here still says Quarters — only the heading inside the pane changed. Once you are in it, the pane's own heading now reads Portfolio time periods, matching the Portfolio areas heading on the tab beside it. Below that heading, and the short explanation under it, is a smaller Quarters heading over the list, with the row that adds a new quarter (or a whole year at once) directly beneath it, above the quarters themselves — the same layout as the Areas pane. Nothing about WHAT you can do here changed, only where the add row sits and what the pane calls itself once you are looking at it.

Also team-admin only, for the same reason.

Your defaults

How the page opens, for you, on any computer. None of it changes what anyone else sees.

• Open on the Overview — start on the dashboard rather than the list.
• Group by area — group by portfolio area instead of by health.
• Expand objectives automatically — an objective you open on the board shows its key results straight away, rather than folded.

The health bands are on this tab too, under Health signal. They used to be a button that closed this dialog and opened the sliders on the board, which is the wrong way round: the board shows the resulting health, and the thresholds that decide it are configuration. The panel is here, with the sliders in it.

The board comes back the way you left it

However you arrange a board is how you will find it next time — next week as much as ten minutes later. That covers the tab you were on, List or Kanban, the grouping, the sort, the area, owner, quarter and status filters, Hide completed, Assigned to me, which groups you had folded away and which objectives and measures you had open.

It is remembered per team: how you read one team's board says nothing about another's, whose areas and quarters are different anyway. Your defaults above are what a board opens with when you have not arranged it yet.

Two things are deliberately not remembered. The search box — a search is a question you are asking now, and coming back to a filtered list with no memory of why is worse than starting clean. And which objective's panel was open, because signing in should put you on the board rather than back inside one row.

Nothing needs saving; it is stored as you go, and only once you actually change something. Simply opening a board changes nothing.

Handing an objective to somebody without OKR access

The owner list offers everybody on the team, including people who have not been given OKR access. Pick one of them and the box says so before you save.

If you are a team admin, saving grants them access — and the note says that plainly, because it is not access to this one objective. It is access to every objective and key result on the team. That is how OKR access works here; there is no per-objective version of it.

If you are not a team admin you can still hand it over, but you cannot grant access, so the note tells you what will actually happen: they will not be able to open it until an admin adds them, from Team settings → OKRs. The assignment is never blocked either way.

Nothing is said when the person already has access, and nothing is said for somebody you have invited who has not signed up yet — they have no account to grant anything to, and they get access with everything else when they claim the invitation.

The new owner is told, twice

Change the owner of an objective or a key result and the person taking it on gets an email and a notice in Messages, the same pair a task assignment sends. The notice mentions them by name, so it lands in their Messages panel with the count on the button rather than sitting somewhere they have to go looking.

It is sent only when the owner actually changes — saving an objective without touching its owner sends nothing — and only after the change has been saved, so nobody is told about a change the database refused.

The notice is posted by the system, on behalf of whoever made the change, and it says so. Nobody can delete it, including the person who made the change: it is the record of a handover, not a comment.

An invited person who has not signed up yet is not emailed or notified. There is no account to reach. They get both the moment they claim their invitation, because the ownership converts to their account at the same time.

Bulk changes: moving several objectives to a new owner

Reassigning five or ten objectives one at a time is the job this replaces. Open OKR settings → Bulk changes → Choose objectives…, tick the ones you are moving, pick the person, and press Change owner.

It acts on the objectives currently in view, so narrow the board first — by area, by quarter, by owner — if you want a shorter list to work from. The dialog says how many that is.

Also change the owner of their key results moves the measures with the objective. It is offered rather than assumed: an objective can be owned by a lead whose individual measures belong to other people.

You are told exactly what it will do before it runs — “Change the owner of 6 objectives and 12 key results to Daniel Cole?” — and what happened afterwards, as counts: 4 changed · 1 refused · 1 failed. Refused is not failed: it means somebody edited that objective while this was running, so it was left alone rather than overwritten. Nothing else about an objective changes — not its area, its quarter, its measures or their values.

Only a team admin sees this tab. That is about keeping a blunt instrument out of the way rather than about permission: anyone on the team can change an owner one objective at a time from the board.

The menu under your initials, and the three kinds of settings in it

OKR settings… is this board's own — areas, quarters, your defaults, bulk changes. It is not the only thing in that menu with the word in it, and the three are deliberately different scopes, listed widest first:

• My settings — yours. The theme, the application font, your default team, email and your AI assistant. The same pane on every page of the suite.
• Configure team… — your team's, if you administer one. It opens Team settings on its Team tab.
• OKR settings… — this board's.

The row used to read simply Settings, which was the same word this page already used for its own gear one gesture away. It is My settings now, on all five pages of the suite, and the possessive is the point: it is the one that belongs to you.

All three open over the board, in place. The objectives stay where they are behind the pane; close it and you are still exactly where you were, with the same filters, the same quarter and the same objectives open. Nothing is reloaded.

Profile & account, at the top of the same menu, now opens over the board as well — it used to take you to another page and bring you back, and that is no longer true. Nothing in this menu costs you your place on the board.

Updating a key result

The progress bar is the control. Drag it, or type the number in the box beside it, and it saves — there is no Edit dialog to go through to move a measure. It works from the keyboard too: focus the bar and use the arrow keys, or Home and End for the ends. Hold Shift for larger steps.

Measures you hold inside a range

Not every key result is a journey to 100%. "Hold sprint health at or above B" or "keep p95 latency under 200ms" is Control — stay inside a band: choose that Direction and the form asks for an At least and/or an At most instead of a start and a target, because a band has no journey to be part-way along.

These are described in their own words throughout. The row says inside the band or outside the band rather than "34 days ahead", the detail panel shows the floor, the ceiling and whether it is holding, and the check-in dialog states the band instead of a target. A measure whose goal is a score of 85 is never described as a percentage of 100.

If you have chosen Control but set neither bound, everything says no band set — nothing is being checked until you give it an edge.

What is being measured

A key result carries more than two numbers. In Edit you can say:

A control measure is not a journey — “hold attrition between 4% and 8%” has nowhere to travel to. So it gets a plain verdict, Inside the band or Outside the band, rather than a progress bar, and it counts as met while it holds. Without this it would sit at 0% and drag every roll-up above it down.

Who is on it: owner and contributors

Objectives and key results both name people the same way, and the field is in the same place in both editors — beside Owner.

Every key result has one owner — the person who answers for the number — and every objective has one too. In Edit you can also name contributors: everybody else working on it. Press Choose… next to Contributors and the same picker opens that you use to share a note — search by name or email, tick as many people as you want, then press Done. Searching again does not lose who you have already ticked, and the people you have chosen are listed under the search box until you finish. Cancel changes nothing.

They show on the key result itself, right after the owner, as Contributors: Ashley Davis, James Reed. Beyond two it names the first two and counts the rest, and hovering shows all of them. Open Details and the Metric section lists every one by name.

If nobody else is on the measure, nothing about contributors appears at all — just the owner. That is the ordinary case and it is not something you need to fill in.

Contributors are a record of who is involved — they do not change who can edit the key result or the objective. Anyone on the team with OKRs switched on can already do that.

On an objective it works identically. Open Edit on an objective, press Choose… next to Contributors, tick people, press Done. The objective card then shows them the same way a key result does — two names, then +N contributors.

Everything behind a key result, folded away

Details and Linked work stay lit while their panel is open, so you can see at a glance what you have already opened. The panel is headed Details to match the button. Every other button on the row — Check in, Edit, Comments — works whether a panel is open or not.

Press Details on a key result and it opens a workspace under the row, in five sections you can fold independently: Measurement (the baseline, current and target, progress against the quarter clock), Metric (what is counted, direction, unit, dates, owner and contributors), Check-ins, Supporting tasks and Insight.

A folded section still tells you what is in it. Measurement collapses to something like 62% of target · 3 days behind, Supporting tasks to 4 supporting tasks. You can read the whole measure with everything shut. What you fold stays folded, against your account rather than the key result, so it changes nothing for anyone else.

Health is worked out, never set

There is no health field to change. It is computed from the numbers and the calendar every time the page draws — move a measure and its health, its objective's health and every roll-up above it follow immediately. A health you could set by hand would be right on the day somebody set it and quietly wrong afterwards.

Supporting tasks (Linked work) — you see your own

Linked work on a key result shows your tasks pointing at it — title, who it is for, when it is due — and each opens in Tasks. Link a task attaches one you already have; + Add task creates a new one and links it in a single step, returning you to the measure with it showing underneath.

A key result is a team measure, so several people usually link their own work to it. This panel is your view of it: it lists tasks you own, and tasks that name you as owner or assignee. Other people's linked tasks are not shown here, and the “3 linked tasks” count beside the measure counts the same ones, so the number always matches the list. If none of your tasks are linked yet it says so — that does not mean nobody is working on the measure.

A task created this way is one of your own tasks. Who can see it is decided exactly as it is for any other task of yours; linking never changes that.

The “3 linked tasks” count is also the way in — press it and the panel opens, the same as pressing Linked work. And a task in that list opens the real task, on your own list, with its editor up: the same task, the same comments, the same status. Nothing about it is a copy made for the key result.

Writing insights for everything at once

Above the objectives, Re-evaluate OKRs in view writes an insight for every objective and key result currently shown — useful at the start of a quarter or after a round of check-ins, when doing them one at a time would be dozens of clicks.

The whole board goes in one request. It used to make one request per objective and key result; now everything in view is sent together, which is far cheaper — the instructions no longer have to be re-sent with every single item. It tells you what it will cost before it starts, naming both the number of items and how much it is about to send, because one request is not a free request. Anything whose figures have not changed since its insight was written is skipped and never reaches the request — rewriting it would spend money to produce the same paragraph.

A very large board needs more than one request, and it says so before it starts. A single reply can only hold so many insights, so past roughly 145 items the work is split — and the count is named in the confirmation, never decided quietly. While it runs you get one line with the elapsed time ticking, because a single request gives no other honest sign of progress.

Nothing is saved until the reply comes back. This is the real cost of the change and it is worth knowing: closing the tab half way now loses the run, where before it would have kept whatever had already finished. A failure that used to lose one insight now loses the request.

But a reply that only covers part of the board still writes every answer it contains. Whatever it could not cover is counted and reported, with a line at the end like 253 evaluated · 249 written · 4 failed, and a Retry failed button that re-runs only those.

Only the latest insight is kept for each objective and key result. Rewriting one replaces it; there is no history to sift through, because an old insight describes figures that have since moved.

Other people editing at the same time

OKRs are a team's, so several people work on them at once. The board checks for other people's changes in the background and refreshes itself when something moves — you will see a short Updated note when it does. It will not refresh while you have a dialog open or are dragging a progress bar.

If somebody saves a change to the same objective or key result while you have it open, your save is refused rather than silently overwriting theirs. The editor stays open with everything you typed still in it, and tells you what happened so you can check their version and reapply anything still needed. Dragging a progress bar behaves the same way: their number is shown, and you can set yours again if it is still right.

Filtering by quarter, and what the percentages mean

The control captioned Period opens a grid of quarters, two years at a time. Click a quarter to light it and click it again to put it out; click one and then Shift-click another to take the whole run between them. Four quick picks sit above the grid — Current quarter, Year to date, Last 4 quarters and All — and each of those replaces your selection rather than adding to it.

Nothing changes on the board until you press Apply. That is the point of the panel: building a three-quarter view is one reload, not three. Esc, or a click outside, closes the panel and discards whatever you had staged. Use Earlier years and Later years to move the two-year window; a quarter you picked and then paged out of sight stays picked, and the summary under the grid keeps naming it.

The number on each quarter is how many objectives are filed in that quarter — all of them, whatever your filters are set to. So a quarter can show 3 and still look empty when you open it. That means your filters are hiding them, and the board says so: it names how many were hidden and lists every filter that is on, so you can see which one to clear.

Current quarter, beside the control, takes you straight back to the quarter today falls in and nothing else — the view the page opens on. It grays out when that is already all you are looking at, or when no quarter covers today; hover it either way and it says which.

When a filter is on, an objective's percentage covers only the measures in view. If some of its key results are in other quarters you will see a +N outside flag next to the percentage — in List and in Kanban alike — and hovering it says how many and which quarters they are in. In List a short line under the row says the same thing out loud; on a Kanban card the flag carries it on its own, because a sentence per card would be a wall of text. That is a note, not a problem: an objective set in one quarter often carries work into the next.

Press the flag to see which key results those are. A small list opens beside it, grouped by quarter with the earliest first, and each line names the key result, whose it is and how far along it is — so you can see what the rest of the objective looks like without leaving the quarter you are reading. It opens from the keyboard too: Tab to the flag and press Enter or Space. Esc closes it and puts you back on the flag, and so does clicking anywhere outside it or pressing the flag a second time. A measure that has been archived is still listed, because the count includes it, and is labeled archived so you can tell. To bring any of them into the board and into the percentage, widen Period.

Moving the progress bar

Drag the bar on a key result, or type the number in the box beside it. Progress is always a whole percentage — while you are dragging, the bar, the number and what a screen reader announces all say the same thing, and none of them show decimals.

The bar works from the keyboard too. Tab to it, then ←/→ move one percent, Shift with them moves ten, Home is 0% and End is 100%.

The value saves when you let go, not on every pixel, and a check-in box then offers itself. Dismissing it keeps the new value — it only skips writing a note.

Adding a whole year of quarters

In Settings → Cycles, Add whole year creates Q1 to Q4 with the right dates in one press. Quarters you already have are left alone, so adding a year you started early fills in the rest rather than complaining.

The detail behind a key result

Press Details on a key result to open its workspace. The row stays the summary; this adds what a row has no space for, in sections you can fold away:

Folded sections still tell you what is in them — “# of protocols · Increase · target 100”, “2 check-ins” — and whatever you fold stays folded next time.

Written insights

A key result, an objective and the quarter digest can each carry a short written reading of their figures. Press Write insight (or Regenerate) and one is produced from the numbers already on the page.

It uses whichever assistant you configured in Tasks' settings — nothing here is tied to one provider. With none configured, an insight already written stays readable and the regenerate button is simply not offered.

Each insight says when it was written and who wrote it — “Written Aug 27, 2026 at 5:15 PM EDT · generated by your personal AI assistant”. The time is shown in the zone your clock is set to in Tasks, not the zone of whatever computer you happen to be on, and the zone is named so there is nothing to work out. Hover the line for how long ago that was. No provider is named: which assistant you configured is your business, and an insight you may paste into a board update should not carry it.

When the underlying numbers move, the insight says “the figures have changed since this was written” rather than quietly reading as current. Nothing regenerates on its own — an insight that rewrites itself while you are reading it is worse than one that is old. If a regeneration fails, the previous one stays exactly where it was.

What an area means

An area is simply a label an objective sits under. Your team chooses what areas mean to it — departments, products, functions, or anything else.

Retire rather than delete. An area with objectives under it cannot be removed without orphaning them, so retiring stops it being offered on new objectives while everything already filed under it keeps it. Restore brings it back.

Only a team administrator can change any of this. Which sections you fold and how you have arranged the page are yours alone.

The review panels: carryover, hygiene and the digest

Underneath the quarter grid on Overview are three panels that answer a different question from the rest of the page. The grid says where things stand; these say what needs a decision this week.

Carryover

Key results still open in a quarter that has already ended. Nobody chose to carry them — they were simply never closed — and left alone they pile up until the OKR set stops describing anything real.

The list is ordered by how long each has been sitting, longest first, because that is the ordering that tells you where to start. Completed and archived measures never appear here: they finished.

Click a row and its editor opens right there, over the Overview — finish it, move it to this quarter, or archive it, press Save, and it drops off the list. You stay where you were, so a list of ten is ten decisions rather than twenty trips to another screen. The › at the end of the row is the other way: it takes you to the measure in the objectives list, among its siblings and its check-in history.

Data hygiene

Records nobody can act on. Each row is a finding, not a statistic — click it and you get the list of exactly which objectives or key results it means. Click one of those and its editor opens, the same way a carryover row works: an objective’s finding opens the objective, a key result’s opens the key result, and the › beside it goes to the objectives list instead.

A key result's row carries one more control beside that chevron — a small circular button that opens the objective it belongs to, so you do not have to close the measure's editor and go looking for it separately just to see whether the objective around it needs updating too. An objective-level finding (nothing measurable, no owner) does not need this: clicking the row already opens the objective.

Digest

A summary you can paste into an email or a chat channel. The figures are always there — objectives, key results, average progress, completed key results, carryover — and Copy text takes them whether or not you use AI. It copies exactly that: text, laid out to paste straight into a message without reformatting. There is no chart here to copy; the ring drawings live in the quarter grid further up the page.

It describes whatever the Period control says. Pick one quarter and the digest is about that quarter, and tells you how much of it has gone. Pick All quarters — or several — and it widens to cover them all, and the Quarter elapsed figure steps aside, because there is no single quarter for it to be a share of.

If you have an AI assistant configured in Tasks' settings, Write digest adds a short narrative underneath. It reads only the figures shown above it: the assistant is never asked what the numbers are, so it cannot get them wrong. It uses whichever provider you configured — nothing here is tied to one vendor.

An objective can span several quarters

A key result belongs to one quarter. An objective belongs to whichever quarters its key results are measured in, so a single outcome can carry Q3 and Q4 measures and will appear in both quarters' views. Filing an objective in a quarter does not fence it there.

Connecting a task to an outcome

Open any task — in Tasks or on a team board — and tick Mark as an OKR. That checkbox is the way in: with it unticked the task is an ordinary task and none of this appears. Tick it and a Supports section appears underneath, offering four things:

If you belong to one team, it is used automatically. If you belong to several, you are asked which one first, and you then see only that team's objectives. A task on a team board already belongs to a team, so it never asks.

Measured and unmeasured work

Most tasks support a key result, and progress rolls up through it. Some support an objective directly: running the quarterly customer interviews supports “understand why customers churn” without moving any single number. Linking those to the objective keeps them visible without inventing a measure nobody intends to track.

Getting to the outcome from the task

A connected task shows what it supports, how that measure is doing, and two ways through: View KR opens the key result, and Objective opens the outcome above it. Either one takes you to that exact item on the OKR page — expanded, scrolled to and highlighted — switching quarter if it belongs to a different one. You are not dropped on the OKR page to go looking for it.

Changing or removing the connection

Once a task is connected the four choices are replaced by two: Change and Remove link. Change offers the same searchable list and swaps the connection over for you — it links the new one first, so a task is never left supporting nothing.

Unticking “Mark as an OKR”

Nothing is unlinked. Unticking the box hides the OKR workflow for that task; the connection stays exactly where it was, and ticking the box again brings it straight back. The task tells you so rather than going quiet, because a section that simply vanishes reads as a link that was deleted.

Removing a connection is its own deliberate action — the Remove link button — and it never touches the objective or key result either.

What linking does not change

Connecting a task to an outcome adds context and nothing else. It does not change who can see the task, who it is assigned to, or whether it is on a board. A private task linked to a team objective is still a private task — your colleagues see the objective, not your task.

You can only link to objectives in teams you belong to, and only on tasks you own.

Seeing the outcome from a task

Open any task and, under the board fields, a Supports section shows the outcome that task moves: the objective, the key result beneath it, where that number is now, and how it is tracking against the quarter. Open takes you to the OKRs page.

That is the answer to "why am I doing this?" without leaving the task. It is read-only on purpose — outcomes are edited on the OKRs page, so the numbers have one home rather than two that can disagree.

If the task is not linked to anything, the section says so and offers a way over. If your team has not switched OKRs on, the section does not appear at all.

Who can change what

Everyone on the team can see every objective. That is the point of having them. Editing is narrower: the owner, whoever created it, anyone listed as a contributor, and team administrators. If a button is missing, that is why.

Deleting an objective deletes its key results, check-ins and comments with it, and the app asks first.

Only a team admin can switch the whole OKR feature on or off for the team, from Team settings on the team board.