Module 1 — Getting Started · Lesson 1.1
First Login and Your Workspace
What a workspace is, what gets created with it, and the three decisions you make on day one
~11 min
What you'll learn
- Explain what a workspace scopes and why nothing crosses between two of them
- Complete signup and the onboarding flow, and know what each step created
- Switch between workspaces and tell which one you are acting in
- Recognize the three day-one decisions worth getting right the first time
A Kavanah workspace is not a folder or a view. It is the security boundary, the billing boundary, and the boundary of what the AI agent can see. Every task, project, client, deal, message, document, integration, credit and charter line belongs to exactly one workspace, and nothing is visible across two of them. If you understand that one fact before you click anything, most of the product's structure follows from it — including several behaviours that look like bugs when you do not.
Signing up, and what actually gets created
Signing up creates two things that people routinely confuse: a user account and a workspace. The account is you — your email, your password, your two-factor settings, your profile, your timezone. The workspace is the container your work lives in. One account can belong to many workspaces, and switching between them changes essentially everything on screen.
After you verify your email, the onboarding flow walks you through naming the workspace and setting it up. Take the name seriously: it appears in the workspace switcher, in emails Kavanah sends on your behalf, and in the client portal your customers may eventually log into. It is editable later, in Settings, but the slug that gets derived from it is the thing your teammates will see in links.
Onboarding also seeds the workspace with the structures the rest of the product expects — a default project so the board is not empty, default task statuses so the board has columns, and your own membership as the workspace owner. Owner is the highest role: it can do everything an admin can, plus the things that end the workspace.
The boundary, and the surprises it causes
Because the workspace is the boundary, several things that feel like they should be global are not. Your integrations are connected per workspace: connecting Gmail in one workspace does not connect it in another, because the credential is stored against that workspace's membership. Your credits are a workspace pool, not a personal balance. The AI agent's memory, its charter, its personas and its scheduled runs all belong to the workspace they were created in.
This is the source of the single most common confusion for people who belong to two workspaces: they connect a calendar, switch workspace, and find the calendar empty. Nothing broke. The agent, likewise, always acts on the currently active workspace — if you ask it about a task you are sure exists and it cannot find one, check the switcher before you check anything else.
The switcher lives at the top of the sidebar, in the account area, and there is a dedicated page for it if you have several. Making a habit of glancing at it before you ask the agent to do something costs nothing and saves a genuinely surprising amount of confusion.
The three decisions worth making deliberately
First: your timezone. It is set on your profile and it is not cosmetic. Kavanah uses it to interpret every time you give the agent, to decide when a scheduled report or a recurring run fires, and to render times back to you. A wrong timezone means a report you asked for at 9am arrives at 2am, and the fix after the fact is more annoying than the thirty seconds it takes now.
Second: whether this workspace is yours alone or a team's. That decision shapes how you name projects, whether you bother with roles, and whether the client portal is relevant at all. It is easy to add people later, but a workspace that started as a private notebook usually has to be tidied before anyone else can read it.
Third: what the workspace is actually for. Kavanah has a formal place to write this down — the KVN charter — and it is the single highest-leverage piece of writing in the product, because it is the thing the AI agent checks before it creates work. You do not need it on day one, and Module 6 covers it properly. But it is worth knowing now that the answer to 'why did the agent refuse that?' is usually 'because you told it to' three weeks earlier.
Two ways in, and one thing they share
Kavanah runs as a web app, as a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux, and as a mobile app for iOS and Android. They are the same product against the same workspace, not three separate accounts — signing in on your phone shows the same board you left on your laptop.
What they share is the workspace boundary. If you are in the wrong workspace on your phone, the phone is wrong in exactly the way the browser would be. Everything in this course applies to all three shells unless a lesson says otherwise.
Do this now
- 1
Set your timezone on your profile
Open your profile from the account menu and set the timezone to where you actually are. Everything scheduled — reports, recurring runs, agent-set reminders — resolves against it.
- 2
Look at the workspace switcher
Find it at the top of the sidebar. Note the name of the workspace you are in. If you belong to more than one, get used to checking this before you ask the agent for anything.
- 3
Open the dashboard and read the right rail
The dashboard is the default landing page. The rail on the right carries your briefing, agent alerts, notifications and recent activity — it is the fastest read of what changed since you were last here.
- 4
Open the board and confirm a project exists
Onboarding seeds one. If the board is empty, the next lesson set is where you create your first real project rather than working in the default one.
What to watch
- Time-to-first-task
- How long between creating the workspace and the first real task existing in it — not the seeded example, a task about work you actually have.
- Healthy signal: Same session. A workspace that goes a week without a real task usually never gets one; the setup was the project, and the work stayed elsewhere.
- Profile completeness
- Whether your timezone, name and skills are filled in. Kavanah reads all three — the first for scheduling, the third for assignment recommendations.
- Healthy signal: All three set in week one. Skills in particular are self-service and nobody will do it for you.
Key takeaways
- ·A workspace is the security, billing and agent-visibility boundary — nothing crosses between two of them.
- ·Signup creates an account AND a workspace; one account can belong to many workspaces.
- ·Integrations, credits, agent memory and the charter are all per-workspace, which is why they look 'missing' after a switch.
- ·Set your timezone before you schedule anything; it drives every recurring send and every time you give the agent.
- ·The agent always acts on the ACTIVE workspace — check the switcher before you debug anything else.
You now have a workspace and know what it contains. The next lesson is a guided tour of the interface itself — what the sidebar groups mean, why the surfaces are ordered the way they are, and where to look for the thing you cannot find.