Workspaces — Containers for Context

What a Workspace Is

A workspace is a named container that holds weaves. That’s it.

It’s not a team. It’s not a folder with permissions. It’s a boundary — a way of saying “these projects belong together, and those don’t.”

Why Workspaces Exist

Most people have more than one area of life that generates projects. You might have a workspace for your day job, another for a side project, another for personal planning. Without workspaces, all of these would share a single sidebar, and the cognitive cost of context-switching would be paid every time you glanced at the project list.

Workspaces let you compartmentalize. When you’re in your “Side Project” workspace, your day job weaves don’t exist. They’re not hidden or filtered — they’re simply not part of this context. The sidebar is clean. The mental space is clear.

Switching Workspaces

The workspace switcher is accessed from the toolbar (the stacked squares icon) or via Cmd+Shift+W. It presents a picker showing all your workspaces, ordered by last opened. Selecting one replaces the entire sidebar with that workspace’s weaves.

This is an intentional friction. Switching workspaces is a deliberate act — you’re changing context, and the app acknowledges that by making it a distinct gesture rather than a tab or a filter.

The Workspace Picker

When you first launch Loomline, or when you explicitly switch workspaces, you see the workspace picker — a clean screen showing your workspaces as cards. You can create new ones here, or select an existing one to enter.

This screen is the lobby. It’s where you decide what you’re going to work on before you start working. The brief pause it creates is by design.

Workspace Boundaries

Weaves belong to exactly one workspace. They can’t be shared across workspaces or moved between them (by design — if a project belongs in two contexts, it probably needs to be split into two projects).

Smart filters, tags, and the sidebar all operate within the current workspace. When you search, you search within the workspace. When you filter by status, you filter within the workspace. The workspace is the universe; everything else is local to it.

When to Create a New Workspace

Create a new workspace when you have a genuinely separate area of responsibility. Not for every project — that’s what weaves are for. Workspaces are for the level above projects: life domains, roles, seasons.

Good workspace names: “Work,” “Personal,” “Thesis,” “Studio”

Less useful workspace names: “Q4 Planning,” “Website Redesign,” “Groceries”

The first group describes a context you’ll return to repeatedly. The second describes individual projects that should be weaves within a workspace.