Workspaces

Setting up your workspace is the first thing you do in Task Machine, because a workspace is the boundary that everything else lives inside. This chapter walks through that structure from the outside in: the workspace itself, then the members and roles who work in it, the teams that group them, and the projects, goals, and labels that organize the work. Start here, because nothing you create later has a home until a workspace exists.

A workspace is one operating context

A workspace is the boundary around one company, client, or operating context, and it is the unit Task Machine uses for both navigation and access. Everything you work with belongs to exactly one workspace: members and the roles that govern them, teams, projects, goals, labels, tasks, the inbox, agents, machines and runtimes, documents, artifacts, memories, workflows, and the audit trail. Because the boundary is hard, nothing leaks across it — work in one client's workspace is invisible from another's.

You give a workspace a name when you create it, and Task Machine derives a stable slug from that name. The slug is part of every workspace URL, which is how the app always knows which context to load. Rename the workspace and the slug it was created with stays put, so links you have already shared keep working.

You can belong to more than one workspace

A single account can be a member of several workspaces at once, and the app switches between them cleanly. This is the normal shape for anyone running work for more than one company or client: one sign-in, separate worlds. Which workspaces you can open is decided by your memberships, not by your account settings — your account holds your personal preferences, while each membership grants you a place inside one workspace. The next chapter, members and roles, is about those memberships.

Workspace settings are gated by permission

Changing the workspace itself — its name, its logo, and its workspace-level configuration — requires the workspace-update permission, which the owner role always carries. Whoever creates a workspace becomes its owner and holds that permission from the start. Members without it simply do not see workspace management actions, and a page that needs management access shows a no-permission state rather than dangling controls that would fail.

This is the first place you meet Task Machine's approach to control: access is decided by what a member's role permits, applied at the point where the change happens, not by a global switch. Members and roles covers how those permissions are assigned, and the permissions reference lists every key.

The workspace stays live as others work

A workspace is a shared, multi-session space, so what you see updates as other people and agents act. When someone changes a workspace's identity, adds or suspends a member, accepts an invitation, moves a task, or a machine comes online, the pages you already have open update through live subscriptions — no manual refresh. This matters most once agents are running: the workspace reflects their work as it happens, and you stay oriented without reloading.

From here, fill the workspace with the people and agents who will do the work. Continue to members and roles.