Keep a board going

A session board has a natural end. A board you use for your actual work does not: it starts clean, it fills up, and after three weeks nobody can tell what is current. This guide is about that second kind of board — a Kanban board or a week planner that has to survive its third week.

Nothing here is a new feature. It is a small number of habits that decide whether the board stays readable, plus the product rules that make some habits work better than others.

What you’ll learn

How to start a board that is meant to last.
How to decide what a column means, and who may move a note into it.
How to keep the board readable as it grows.
What to do when it fills up, given that an ordinary board cannot be archived.

Start from a lasting template

Create a board without turning on Start a workshop. The starting points then include the two meant for work that continues:

Kanban — To do, Doing and Done, for work that moves through stages over weeks.
Week planner — a column for every weekday.

Both are ordinary private boards. You can rename a column, add one, or change the layout later; nothing about the choice is permanent.

Agree what a column means

The most common reason a long-running board dies is not clutter. It is that “Doing” quietly comes to mean two different things — started, and intended.

Write the agreement down on the board itself, as a sticky note in the first column, in one line per column:

Doing = someone is working on it this week
Done = shipped, not "finished on my side"

You wrote that note, so you can keep editing it. That matters: on a private board, only the author can change a note’s text, colour, tags or due date. The Owner, Participants and workshop guests can move any note between columns while arranging is available, but they cannot rewrite it. Ordinary Post-link contributors cannot arrange notes.

A note moves when reality moves. A board where notes move because it is Friday is a board people stop trusting within a month.

Decide who is on it, once

Two ways in, and they are not the same thing:

Invite a Participant by email when someone belongs on the board permanently. They sign in or create an account first, and the invitation expires after 14 days. Participants get the full set: create, edit and delete their own notes, arrange anything, comment, use hearts and vote.
Share a View link or a Post link when access should be narrower. A View link is read-only and needs no account. A Post link lets a signed-in user on any plan create, edit and delete their own sticky notes while the link remains active. Link users never become Participants: they cannot arrange notes, comment, use hearts, vote, invite people, manage access or change board settings.

For a board that runs for months, prefer invitations over links. A link keeps working for whoever it was forwarded to, and you will not remember in October who received it in August. Revoking a link takes effect immediately and leaves the notes that were already added.

Inviting people requires Club Host, Club Facilitator or Chosen Few, and a confirmed email address.

Keep it readable

Use tags for what you filter on. Tags group related notes and filter the board. A note can have several. Tags become lower case automatically and exist only inside their board. Pick three or four and stop — a board with twenty tags is a board with none, and you cannot merge tags afterwards.

The Owner and every current Participant can create, rename and delete board tags. Renaming changes the label wherever it is used; deleting removes the label without deleting any sticky note. Only the author can change which tags are attached to their sticky note. Agree the tag names before people start using them so shared labels stay predictable.

Use colour for expression, not status. Colours have no fixed meaning in StickyNotes.club. Your group can agree on a convention, but add a visible tag as well when the meaning matters, so nobody has to rely on colour alone.

Use a due date as a reminder, not a system. A note on a private board can have one due date, set by its author. After the date passes the note shows a red clock icon and the expired date. That is all it does: it does not assign the note, send an email, create a task or filter the board.

A sticky note has an author, but no assignee. Notes cannot be assigned. To draw a current Participant’s attention, mention them — that sends them an email straight away. If an action needs a responsible person and a date, write those details in the note itself. Only its author can edit that text later.

Expect quiet, and count on it

A long-running board deliberately does not shout. StickyNotes.club sends an email for an invitation, for revoked access and for an explicit mention, plus at most one activity digest per day when a board you can access has changed. Individual notes, comments, hearts and votes never each produce an email, and there is no activity inbox in the product.

That is a feature for a board that runs for months, and it has one consequence: nothing pulls people back. Put the board link where the work already happens — the weekly meeting invitation, the channel topic — and open it together at a fixed moment. A shared board without a recurring moment is a board one person maintains.

Re-prioritise without losing the last result

You can run a dot-voting round on a private board whenever the list has grown past what the group can do. The Owner starts the round, chooses 1, 3, 5 or 10 dots per person and closes it; results stay hidden until then.

One rule matters over months: only the latest closed round remains available. Starting a new round permanently replaces the previous one and its results, without a separate warning. If the outcome of a round needs to survive, write it onto a note before you vote again.

When the board fills up

An ordinary board cannot be archived. Archive this session applies only to a finished workshop. So a board that runs for months only stays readable if someone clears it, and there are two honest ways to do that.

Clear the finished column. Delete the notes in Done once a cycle. Deleting removes a note immediately, together with its comments, hearts and votes; whoever deleted it sees Undo for a few seconds, and after that it is gone. There is no version history and no earlier version to restore, so read a column before you empty it.

Or start the next cycle clean. Open Board settings and select Duplicate this board. The copy keeps the columns, layout, background and settings, and brings no notes, people, links or session activity. Move the handful of notes that are still live by writing them again on the new board, and keep the old one as the record of that quarter. A duplicate counts as a new board against your plan’s limit.

Choose deliberately. Clearing keeps one board and loses the history; duplicating keeps the history and costs a board.

Good to know

Board changes normally appear to everyone viewing the board within a few seconds, without refreshing.
Note text saves automatically, and simultaneous edits are never silently overwritten.
A comment cannot be edited after posting. You can delete your own comment; the note and other comments stay.
Arranging a note changes only its position, order or column. It never changes authorship or the right to edit the text.
If a Participant later deletes their account, their notes stay on the board and the author is shown as Deleted user.
Tags and due dates exist only on private-board notes, not on worldwide-wall Drafts, Public sticky notes or Instant Photos.