Publish your first Beacon
There are exactly two things between signing up and having a page you can send a client. Everything else has a working default you can leave alone.
1. Add a real job
A job is a piece of work you have taken on. At minimum it needs a name and a due date - the due date is what makes it count towards your capacity, because the calculation is about a window of time.
The number that matters is the base amount: how much work you think it is, in your own unit. Hours is the default.
An empty account offers you three example jobs to try the app with. They are badged as samples, they do not count towards this step, and publishing is blocked outright while any of them exists - so made-up load can never reach a client. Your own dashboard does include them in the ring, deliberately, so you can see what they would project. Use “Remove sample data” when you are ready to publish for real; it removes only the samples.
Add jobs and recurring work covers what each field does to the figure.
2. Publish it
Press Update Beacon on your dashboard. That writes a snapshot - your True Load, your status and your next opening date, frozen at that moment - and the snapshot is what your public page serves.
Until you have published once, your Beacon URL is not live. It answers “not found” rather than showing an empty page. This is the one hard gate in the product: there is nothing honest to show a visitor before you have published something.
What you can leave alone
Every capacity input ships with a default that works. You do not have to configure a working pattern before publishing, and nothing in the app treats an unconfigured one as a problem.
| Setting | Default |
|---|---|
| Working days | Monday to Friday |
| Hours a day | 8 |
| Planning horizon | 4 weeks |
| Cognitive buffer | 20% held back |
| Availability threshold | 80% |
| Timezone | UTC |
If those describe you, you never have to open the capacity settings. If they do not, Set your working hours is the page for it - and it is worth doing before you publish, because the percentage is measured against them.
Then send the link
Your Beacon lives at a URL built from your username. Sharing it is the whole point, and the app cannot tell whether you have - copying a link leaves no trace, and nothing here is going to pretend otherwise.
From there: Share your Beacon covers the three ways a client can see it, and Keep it from going stale covers what happens if you publish once and forget.