Cycles and eras

A cycle is a named span of calendar time — a sprint, a chapter, a season. It is a fiber like any other, and it is the one row on the board that is not work.

---
name: Autumn 2026
tags: [cycle]
start: 2026-09-01
due: 2026-11-30
---

Get the shear pipeline to a state someone else could run.

Three things make it a cycle:

• the cycle tag — matched case-insensitively on a trimmed tag, so Cycle and cycle are the same declaration;
• start: and due: as civil days, the span's opening and closing edges;
• the body's first paragraph, read as the intention — what this stretch of time is for.

The Chronicle draws it as a named band over the day grid.

Degenerate spans

Both dates are optional, and each omission means something:

Written	Span
start + due	the span as written
due, no start	a one-day span on the due day — a cycle that names only its end is a deadline, and a deadline is a day
start, no due	open-ended: runs from start to today, and grows with the calendar until someone writes a due:
neither	no span; nothing to draw

A cycle is never on the desk

classifyFiber checks the cycle tag first and unconditionally, before any lifecycle question. Its status, its due:, even a shuttle: block someone pasted onto it, cannot put it in a Desk column — a cycle routes straight to the cycles surface. Otherwise an open cycle would read as a draft and a finished one as a card that had drifted past its date, and one stray "Autumn 2026" in Drafts teaches you to distrust the column.

Membership is derived, never assigned

A fiber is never put in a cycle. There is no field to write, nothing to keep in sync, and no way for a cycle's roster to disagree with the calendar. The board asks three questions in order, and the first that answers is the reason:

Rung	A fiber belongs when
due	its due: falls inside the span — the plain reading of "this is due this sprint"
in-flight	it is being worked right now and the span covers today. Work in flight belongs to the chapter you are living in; it says nothing about a chapter that has not opened
worked	it was worked on some day inside the span

Both edges of the span are inclusive.

The worked rung is the real historical rule, and it is the one the Desk cannot answer: activity days live in the temporal feeds, which the Desk does not fetch. On the Desk the rung is simply skipped; the Chronicle, which has the activity, uses it.

Working with them

Cycles are a board gesture. There is no shuttle cycle verb — a cycle is ordinary frontmatter (tags, start:, due:), so nothing stops you writing one in the file, and everything below is the board's shorthand for that.

• Draw one by dragging across days in the Chronicle's cycle strip, then naming the span.
• Speak one with +: dictate the intention, and the cycle starts today and runs open-ended.
• Rename by double-clicking the name; respan by dragging an edge.
• Click the band to open the cycle's own page — the board calls this the era face: span, intention, derived figures, and the look back, a memoir composed from the commit trail. Inscribe this review writes that memoir back into the cycle fiber's body.
• Snooze into one: while dragging a card, the drag horizon offers a chip per upcoming cycle. Dropping on it sets due: to that cycle's start day, clamped to tomorrow when the cycle is already running — "rest until tomorrow, later this cycle."

The look back reads the commit ledger

The era memoir is composed from ~/.shuttle/commits.jsonl, which the shuttle hook commit PostToolUse hook writes. Commits made outside an agent session leave no trail, so an era worked entirely by hand reads the era left no trail — the band still draws and the membership still resolves. See Telemetry and the ledgers.