Cycles

Cycles are a practice to keep up your team's momentum, similar to commonly used agile flavored sprints.

Cycles summary

The purpose of a cycle is to focus the team’s priorities on a limited amount of work. There is no "sprinting" to a goal. Ideally, you aim to finish the work you chose for the cycle. The unfinished work will roll over to the next cycle automatically.

Cycles run on an automated schedule to reduce unnecessary scheduling work. Cycles become a routine for your team.

Cycles have velocity metrics to gauge the team health and distribution of work. Cycles are not meant to judge the performance of the team or different teams.

Issues can be added to future cycles. This is useful when you know an issue is important to address soon but doesn't fit into the current cycle.

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How does Linear use cycles? People often ask us how we work. We use 2-week cycles which start on Tuesdays. This gives us time on Mondays to push code (to avoid Friday releases) and tie up loose ends before diving into the next set of work.

Set up Cycles

Set cycles to start on any day of the workweek. They can last anywhere from 1-8 weeks. You can even include a cool-down after each cycle to give your team a break and bandwidth to work through technical debt or miscellaneous tasks.

Enable cycles by going to your team settings. They're not enabled by default for teams.

Set up your cycle cadence, schedule, and timezone. You should also enable Estimates to take advantage of Cycle analytics.

If you want to delay the start of the cycle, from the Cycles tab click the three dot menu of the highlighted cycle and Change the cycle start time to 1-4 weeks later.

Set up how many upcoming cycles Linear creates. You can add up to 10 upcoming cycles, which is especially helpful if you run shorter cycle lengths.

Rename cycles to reflect the focus that cycle (or have fun with it!)

Change the start date of individual cycles forward or backward.

Key cycle settings

Under cycle settings, you can toggle on options that will automatically add or remove issues to cycles. We recommend you turn these on as they'll make cycle planning easier.

You can choose to automatically add started or completed issues to the active cycle, so that they're accounted for in the total scope and analytics. You can also require that active issues (e.g. not in backlog) belong to a cycle. If you enable this, any issues marked to do will be assigned to a cycle and any issues moved to the backlog will be removed from cycles.

Add issues to a Cycle

Add issues to a cycle from the issue editor. When selected, use keyboard shortcut Shift C to assign issues to a cycle or save a step with Cmd/Ctrl Shift C to assign it to the current cycle. Use backlog and project views make it easy to find priority issues when cycle planning.

Use the Cycle details sidebar

Bring up the cycle details sidebar using Cmd/Ctrl I while viewing any individual cycle. It will show you analytics, a graph of cycle progress, and how issues have been distributed across team members. Hover over team member names and click filter to view issues by assignee. This is especially useful when running stand-ups and in cycle planning meetings. Use

Issue Peek to view issue description and details without having to leave the cycles list view.

The Cycle graph

The cycle graph can be thought of as or burn-up chart, as opposed to a burned down chart, and shows you workload and progress over time. The grey line reflects scope, or the estimate of all issues in the cycle, and changes as you add or remove issues from the cycle. The dotted line reflects the target velocity you want to hit in order to complete 100% of issues before the cycle ends (weekends are not included and remain flat). The solid purple line shows your actual progress with your current status represented by a dot. We count items in progress as partially done, so there might be progress even if you haven't completed an issue.

Edit Cycles

Cycles can be renamed to be more descriptive. Use keyboard shortcut R to modify a highlighted Cycle’s name.

Numbers associated with cycles cannot be changed or reused once created, even if the cycle didn't start yet. This means that if you delete existing or planned cycles, or reset the team's cycle settings, the next cycle will start with whatever number came after the last planned cycle.

To change the cycle schedule, simply go to cycle settings under team settings and adjust the date and time interval. The changes will show up immediately but not retroactively (e.g. the next possible date).

From the All Cycles page, you can modify individual cycles specifically by clicking on the more menu (three dots). Change the cycle start time to start 1-4 weeks later to adjust for team-wide breaks. Subscribe to your cycle calendar by adding it to Google, copying the URL feed, or downloading a .ics file. There isn't a way to sync cycles across teams but it's something we're considering in the future.

Common Questions

Where do I modify Cycle settings?

Can I set or change the specific date? Is there a date picker?

What does the percentage mean?

Keyboard Shortcuts

R to modify a highlighted cycle’s name

G then C to open cycles

O then C to open a specific cycle

G then V open active cycle

G then W to open upcoming cycle

Shift C to add a selected issue to a cycle

Cmd/Ctrl Shift C to add a selected issue to the active cycle

Did we miss something? Have a question? Email us at hello@linear.app to let us know