Well Field Guide

Your Workspace

Open Well and sign in with your Polywinkle account. If you have a team invitation, open its link and accept it while signed in with the invited email address. You do not need a separate Well password.

Accounts enabled to create workspaces start by naming their company or team. The workspace begins empty. Use the workspace selector to move between teams you belong to.

Projects and Work Items

Choose New Project, give it a name and a short project key, then select a starting template. A project can be visible to the workspace or private to its participants.

Create work items for tasks, stories, bugs, epics, milestones, or subtasks. Add an assignee, priority, status, dates, effort, labels, and a description. Open an item to add comments, mention a teammate by email, log time, or connect dependencies.

Project keys and consecutive item numbers give work a stable reference. Archiving removes an item from active views; archived items can be restored.

Choose a View

Table is the detailed list. Board groups work by status and supports dragging cards between columns. Timeline and Calendar arrange scheduled work by date. Backlog organizes sprint planning. Workload compares open estimated effort with weekly capacity. Docs and Activity keep the project’s context close.

The project Overview shows status, priority, and team summaries. Customize its visible widgets and order. Filters, grouping, visible columns, and saved views let you focus on a particular part of a project.

Sprints and Dependencies

Create a sprint with a goal and date range, move work from the backlog, then start it when the team is ready. Completing a sprint returns unfinished work to the backlog.

Dependencies express which item must finish first. Well rejects circular dependencies and can prevent work from completing while its dependencies remain open. Parent items organize larger outcomes into smaller steps.

People and Teams

People & Teams lists workspace participants and their roles. An authorized manager can create a seven-day, single-use email invitation. The recipient must sign in to the Polywinkle account with that email before joining.

Teams organize groups of participants. Each person has a weekly capacity used for the workload comparison. Capacity reflects all open estimated effort, not a prediction of precisely when it will be done.

Roles and Permissions

Workspace roles provide the initial level of access: viewer, contributor, manager, or administrator. Project membership can provide a different role within a project. Administrators retain recovery access.

Oversight supports custom roles, parent-role inheritance, scoped assignments, start and expiry dates, and assignments tied to a particular login session. Delegation requires sufficient leadership authority; it cannot grant an equal or higher level.

Resource policies can grant View, Edit, View & Edit, or None. An explicit None takes priority. Restricted policies deny unmatched roles; inherited policies can fall back to the containing resource. Oversight authority does not automatically reveal protected work.

Someone with edit-only access can use Submit Change by ID to make a selected change without reading existing protected content.

Documents and Search

Write workspace or project documents using Markdown headings, lists, links, and emphasis. Documents inherit relevant project and resource access. Search finds accessible work items, projects, documents, and people.

Documents are written notes, not a general file-upload library. CSV work-item import is supported; arbitrary file attachments are not currently available.

Workflow and Automation

Project customization controls statuses, colours, groups, custom fields, visible columns, and allowed status transitions. Work-in-progress limits can cap how many items enter a status.

Automations run when an item reaches a configured status. A rule can move it to a group, change its priority, update progress, or notify its assignee. Changes are recorded with the work.

Import and Export

Choose CSV import from the project menu. Review the columns before applying the import. Each batch supports up to 100 records and is saved atomically, so invalid rows do not leave a partly imported batch.

Export includes all accessible work items matching the selected project and filters. Spreadsheet formula-like text is escaped. Keep exports somewhere appropriate for their contents; downloads are outside the app’s access controls.

Appearance and Shortcuts

Choose a light or dark appearance, an accent, density, sidebar width, text size, and reduced motion. Preferences belong to your account and workspace rather than changing the whole team’s display.

Right-click an available control to assign a shortcut. Keymap Preferences supports searching, conflict replacement, restoration, and JSON import/export. Browser-reserved shortcuts are unavailable; typing fields are protected unless a binding explicitly permits them.

Notification Rules controls events by workspace or resource. Personal preferences can suppress delivery without changing other people’s choices. Well’s work notifications appear in its inbox; team invitations are sent by email.

How Updates Work

Well periodically refreshes while the page is visible and idle. It does not provide live presence or chat. Shared records use version checks; if someone else saved a newer version, reload before applying your change.

Table, board, calendar, timeline, and backlog views use the current page of records. Project totals and reports aggregate accessible records beyond that page. Item pages contain up to 100 records; bulk changes and imports support 100 records per operation.

For help, open a ticket. Include the project or item reference, what you expected, and what happened. Do not include passwords or confidential project content unless it is necessary for your report.