Setting up your first workspace

Most people create their first workspace in about eleven seconds, name it after their company, and never think about it again. That works fine for a solo user. It starts to hurt around the time the fourth person joins, because a workspace in Lodos is not a folder — it is the boundary that thirty modules use to decide what you are allowed to see.

This page is about picking that boundary deliberately, and about the two decisions that are genuinely annoying to reverse.

What a workspace actually controls

Open Task Management and you see a board. Open Kronos and you see time entries. Open Lodrive and you see files. These look like three separate apps, and in a sense they are — but every one of them filters its contents by the workspace you have selected in the top bar. Switch workspaces and all three change at once.

That is the whole idea, and it is worth stating plainly because it explains most of the confusion new teams run into:

• A task belongs to a workspace, not to you.
• A file in Lodrive belongs to a workspace.
• Time logged in Kronos is attributed to a workspace.
• An automation runs inside a workspace.

So when someone says "I can't find the file you shared", nine times out of ten they are looking at a different workspace. The file is exactly where you left it.

A few things deliberately sit outside workspaces: your personal Notebook, your Nova library, your Calendar's private entries. Those follow you around regardless of which workspace is active. The split is intentional — your notes are yours, your team's tasks are the team's.

How many should you create?

Fewer than you think. The instinct is to make one per project, which feels tidy for about three weeks and then becomes a switching tax you pay forty times a day.

The rule that holds up: create a workspace when the set of people changes, not when the topic changes.

An agency with an in-house team of nine and three clients who each get read access to their own material needs four workspaces — one internal, three client-facing. A product team of nine building one product needs exactly one, no matter how many projects they run inside it. Task Management, Checklist and Flowchart all have their own project layer inside a workspace; use that for topics.

If you are not sure, start with one. Splitting later is a copy operation. Merging later is a copy operation too, but it is one you have to do while people are actively working in both halves, which is a different kind of afternoon.

The first five minutes

Open Workspace Manager. It is the module that owns creation, renaming, and the member list — everything else just reads from it.

1. Name it after the group, not the work. "Design team" ages better than "Q3 redesign", because the redesign ends and the team does not.
2. Set it before you invite anyone. Renaming is harmless; people just see a new label. But the invite email carries the name, so a rename right after inviting produces a small round of "wait, which one is this?"
3. Decide who is an admin now. Two is the right number for a team under ten. One admin means the whole thing stops when that person is on a plane. Five means nobody feels responsible for it.
4. Turn on only the modules you'll open this week. All thirty are available on every plan including the free one, but a sidebar with thirty icons is a sidebar nobody scans. You can add the rest as you need them.

That last point is the one people skip, and it is the single biggest difference between a workspace that gets used and one that gets abandoned in week two.

Two mistakes that are painful later

Using your personal workspace as the team's

Every account starts with a private workspace. It is genuinely useful — it is where your own notes, your own drafts and your own scratch tasks live. The temptation is to invite the team into it because it already has your stuff in it.

Don't. Once other people are in there, your half-finished thinking is visible in every board and every file list, and the only way out is to move items one at a time. Create a second workspace for the team and keep the first one as yours.

One workspace per client when clients never log in

If your clients do not actually have Lodos accounts, a workspace per client buys you nothing and costs you a switch every time you change context. Use projects inside one workspace instead, and reach for a separate workspace only on the day a client actually needs to see something.

What your plan changes

Workspaces are where the pricing tiers become visible, so it is worth knowing the shape before you build around it.

The free Standard plan gives a single user every one of the thirty modules, 250,000 AI tokens a month and 1 GB of storage. It is a real plan, not a trial — but it is built for one person. The moment you want to invite someone, you are on Basic ($30/user/month, 5M tokens, 30 GB). Pro ($99/user/month, 15M tokens, 50 GB) is where workspace count and automation count stop being capped.

One detail that surprises people in a good way: somebody on the free plan can be invited into your workspace and work in it at no cost to them. You are paying for the seat on your side. So a client, a freelancer or an advisor does not need to buy anything to collaborate with you.

Checking that it worked

Two quick tests before you invite anyone, both of which take under a minute:

Create a task in Task Management, then switch to your personal workspace using the selector in the top bar. The task should disappear. Switch back; it should return. If it does not disappear, you created it in the wrong place.

Then upload any file to Lodrive and do the same. Same expectation. These two checks catch roughly every "where did my thing go" question before it becomes a message in your inbox.