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You don't need a perfect workspace. You need enough of one that your team has somewhere to begin, and a reason to trust what they find there.

Build the simplest version that covers your team's real work this week. You'll learn more from a teammate's first hour working in Todoist than from another afternoon of tweaking the sidebar.

So here's how that workspace gets built. Six steps, in order: enough to give your team a real place to start, without spending your whole day on it.

Name the workspace

Use your company name, or the team name – something your people will recognise the second they see it in their sidebar.

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Add folders, if they help

Folders group related projects together – one per department or area, say: marketing, operations, client work. They keep the sidebar legible once you've got a long list of projects. If your team is small enough that one folder would be empty-looking, skip this. You can always add them later, if the sidebar starts to feel crowded.

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Create four shared projects your team will actually use this week

Not aspirational ones. Real work that's already on someone's plate.

Why four? It's the number we've found that makes a rollout stick – enough that the workspace feels real on day one, not so much that your team opens and abandons it.

Add sections inside each project

Choose sections that match the work.

• Status (To Do, In Progress, Done) works for most teams.
• Phase (Discovery, Build, Launch) works for project-style work.
• Time (This Week, Next Week, Later) works when the rhythm matters more than the type.

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Two or three sections are usually plenty. More than that is structure your team has to learn before they've done any actual work in there.

Pick a layout per project

• The list layout is best for ongoing task lists.
• Board for status workflows.
• Calendar for date-anchored work.

You can switch any time, so don't agonise – and each teammate can view a project in whichever layout suits them. The tasks stay the same underneath.

Add a README task at the top of every shared project

The last step, and the one that does the most work. Create an uncompletable task called README. Inside, put the project's working instructions: how tasks get assigned, what "done" means here, anything specific to how this project runs. Update it as you go – when onboarding turns up a question you hadn't thought of, the answer goes in the README.

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The README is your voice in the workspace before you've said a word. Every "how is this supposed to work?" message your team would have sent you, the README answers first.

You're done when:

• Four projects exist – actually four, not "I'll add the last one tomorrow." Add them to a folder if you like.
• Each project has at least one section.
• Each one has a README task.

Next: Meet them at the door

You've created your workspace. In the next lesson, you'll learn how to make sure your team feels connected to their new system.

"Innovation is born from the interaction between constraint and vision."

Marissa Mayer, former Yahoo CEO