How To Use Panda's Recap

The board

• Swimlanes (the rows) are your projects or areas of work. Columns (To Do → In Progress → Waiting → Done) are the stages. Waiting is for work that has started and is parked on somebody else.
• Add a card with the + in a column. With one swimlane it sits in the column heading; with several, each row of that column has its own + under its cards.
• Drag cards between columns. Dropping one into a “timer” column (In Progress) starts the clock, and moving it anywhere else stops the clock, including into Waiting. The “done” column marks it complete.
• Priority sorts the column, so a high card rises to the top and one with no priority sits at the bottom. Done is left in date order instead, newest day first, under a heading per day.
• Resize a column by dragging the edge of its heading, or a swimlane by dragging the grip at the bottom of its name box. Double-click either to put it back to the default size.
• Have more than one board? Switch between them using the board buttons just below the top bar, and add another with + New Board at the end of them. Manage boards, columns, and swimlanes in Settings. A card can move to another board from inside the card, using the Board / Swimlane picker.

Tracking time

• Hit ▶ on a card to start its timer. A card still in To Do moves to In Progress when you do. Only one runs at a time, so starting a new one stops the last. Cards in Done have no ▶: drag one back out to pick it up again.
• The timer pill up top shows what's running. Click it to jump straight to that card.
• Forgot to hit start? On the Calendar, drag across the time you worked and pick the card. To fix a time you already have, drag its block, or open the card and change the start or end on its entry. The 🗑 beside an entry deletes it.
• A timer left running past four hours turns orange, on the card and in the pill, in case you walked away without stopping it.

Cards

• Give a card a priority (the color), a due date, notes, and a key metric (“40 cases resolved”) that shows up in your Performance Review.
• Client, project and billable come from the swimlane by default, and you can override any of them on a single card. Tags and skills work the other way round: a card's are added to the swimlane's rather than replacing them.
• Skills are what the work took to do, where tags are what kind of work it was. “Development” is a tag. “Requirements Gathering” is a skill. Add them on a swimlane so every card in it inherits them, and on a card for anything that one piece of work needed on top.
• Skills are what your résumé is written from. Leave them empty and Panda falls back to guessing from your tags, which is a guess.
• A card opens with just the essentials. Hit + Add Details for the rest, and − Hide Details to fold it back up.
• Under Add Details you can leave a card out of your Performance Review, your Résumé, your Reports, or any mix of the three. Handy for imported “Busy” blocks or lunch: the time stays on your board and calendar, it just stops counting toward that document. The same three switches exist on a swimlane, which applies to every card in it.

The calendar

• A time grid of your work sessions, in Day or Week view, plus a Month view that shows each day's total and the cards behind it. Each block is time tracked against a card.
• Day and Week open at your work hours, 7am to 8pm until you change them in Settings. Anything outside them is hidden, and the toolbar says how much: press Expand to 24 Hours to see it.
• What's next? above the grid starts the clock on one of your cards, or on a new task.
• Drag across past time to log it, or click a past time to log half an hour from there. Pick one of your cards or create a new one. Clicking right around now starts the timer instead.
• Click a block to open its card. Drag a block to move it, or drag its top or bottom edge (or the small triangle in its corner) to change when it started or ended. Due dates live on the card now, not the calendar.
• In the week view, drag a block sideways to move it to another day. In the month view, drag a card from one day to another to move its time there.
• Import Calendar turns a pile of meetings into tracked work in one go, from a file you export yourself. See below.
• Connect Google Calendar (sign in with Google) links Google Calendar directly, so meetings keep arriving on their own. Also below.

Importing your calendar

Meetings are work, and they're usually the part you forget by review time. Export your calendar, then pick the file with Import Calendar on the Calendar tab, or Import a File… under Bulk add tasks in Settings. Each event becomes a task with its time already logged, worked out from the event's start and end.

• File types: .ics (Outlook, Google, Apple), .csv (classic desktop Outlook), or a spreadsheet (.xlsx).
• Classic Outlook: File → Open & Export → Import/Export → Export to a file → Comma Separated Values → pick your Calendar folder. It asks for a date range at the end, so set it to the period you care about. This is the most reliable option.
• Google Calendar: Settings → Import & export → Export. It downloads a .zip, so unzip it first and import the .ics inside.
• Apple Calendar: select the calendar, then File → Export.
• New Outlook / Outlook on the web: there's no simple export, and many workplaces block it entirely. If you can, open the same account in classic Outlook and use the CSV route.

Two things worth knowing before you export:

• Watch out for "Availability only." If Outlook offers a detail level when saving a calendar, choose Full details. On the lowest setting every title is exported as “Busy” instead of the real name. Panda warns you if it spots this.
• All-day events log no hours. Their end date is the following day, so counting them would add 24 hours each. They still import, just without time.

It imports whatever the file covers. Panda shows you the span and lets you pick a date range first, so a five-year export doesn't dump five years onto your board. Past about 18 months it narrows the range to the last year for you; widen the dates if you actually wanted all of it.

Panda also lists the ten most repeated titles so you can skip the ones that aren't real work. If you hold a standing “Busy” slot every morning so nobody books you, that's hundreds of events that mean nothing in a review. Obvious placeholders (Busy, Focus time, Lunch, Out of office) are ticked to skip already; untick anything you do want, and tick anything else you don't.

Panda then asks where the meetings should go: a swimlane, a status, and optionally a client and project applied to all of them. The next screen lists the first 200 events, where you can send any one of them to a different lane, status, client or project before importing. Event descriptions become notes, and calendar categories become tags. Cancelled events are skipped when the file is an .ics. A .csv brings everything in as it is.

Connecting Google Calendar (sign in with Google)

Importing a file is a one-off. Connect Google Calendar keeps your board in step with your main Google calendar for good. You approve it once, review that first batch of history like any other import, and after that meetings arrive on their own while Panda's Recap is open. Only that main calendar is read, not any other calendar in your Google account.

• Upcoming meetings show up too. A meeting on Thursday appears on your board today, in your first column, with no time on it yet. Once it has actually happened, Panda logs how long it ran and moves it to done. The card arrives straight away; only the time waits.
• It looks a week back and a month ahead each time it checks. Something booked further out arrives when it comes inside the month, and a long gap between visits can leave older meetings behind, so keep the file import for filling in history.
• All-day events are skipped, and so are birthdays, out-of-office and working-location entries. None of them is time you worked.
• New cards show a note in the corner saying what arrived, with Undo if it isn't what you wanted. Time added to a card you already have is logged quietly.
• Meetings you declined are skipped, and so are placeholders by default, the same Busy / Lunch / Focus time list as file import. You can stop skipping placeholders in Settings.
• Panda only reads. It can never create, change, or delete anything in your calendar.
• Turn it off any time in Settings → Calendar. Anything already imported stays. To withdraw Panda's access altogether, use your Google Account permissions page. If Google's approval lapses, syncing stops and the Google Calendar controls leave Settings until you connect again.

You may see a Google screen saying the app isn't verified. Panda's Recap is new and Google's review takes a while; choose Advanced then continue if you're happy to. If you'd rather not, the file import above does the same job with no sign-off needed.

Ask Panda

• Ask questions about the work you've tracked, in your own words. When did I last do something for Acme? What else was I working on that week? Where did my time actually go?
• Answers are looked up on your own board. Panda finds the cards that answer the question and reads those, rather than reading your whole year.
• The numbers are calculated by the app, not written by the AI, so they match your Reports.
• Each answer shows the cards it came from underneath, up to twelve of them. Click one to jump straight to it and check.
• Conversations are kept in the list beside the chat, behind ☰ on a phone, so you can come back to one. + New Chat starts a fresh one, 🗑 deletes any you're done with, and a double-click renames one. The last twenty are kept, in this browser.
• Free with your account. Panda answers anything about how the app works, how to set something up, or what things cost. Up to 150 questions a month.
• Reading your board is Pro. The buttons at the top of this screen answer the three commonest ones for free, with no AI at all. They sit above a new chat, so + New Chat brings them back.

Reports

• A dashboard of where your time went. Each donut is a way to slice it (by swimlane, client, project, tag, skill, or billable).
• Time by Task lists the cards your hours went to in that period, busiest first. Open it for every card, not just the top five.
• Time by Skill answers a different question from the rest: not where the hours went, but what they went into building. A card carrying two skills counts in both, so those totals can add up to more than your tracked time.
• Pick the period: day, week, month or quarter, with arrows to step through past ones, or year to date and your own dates.
• Narrow it with the filters above the tiles, by board, client, project, swimlane, tag or skill. Open any donut and Break down by crosses it with a second one, so you can read billable hours by client.
• Click any card in a report to jump to it on the board. Export a view to CSV or Excel, and the whole dashboard in one file.
• The invoices summary at the foot shows what you have billed for the period, with a link across to the Invoices tab.

Invoices

• Turn tracked hours into an invoice. Every card marked Billable, with a client and time tracked inside the period, becomes a line, and you type the rate when you generate.
• Start one from the Invoices tab, where you pick the period and it opens on last month; from the Invoice button on Reports, which uses the period you are looking at; or from Generate Invoice on a single card, which bills every hour that card has ever tracked.
• Every line is yours to change before it goes out. Fix the hours, reword it, add a line that was never on a card, or type 0 in the amount for work you did at no charge, which prints as No charge. Editing here never changes your tracked time.
• If hours on the draft are already on an earlier invoice, Panda says so and names it, and leaves them for you to decide.
• Preview shows the real PDF before you send anything. Download as Word or PDF, and each invoice is saved to your history with its number, dates and totals.
• The Invoices tab is where you chase money: filter by unpaid, overdue or paid, by client or year, see what is invoiced, paid, outstanding and overdue, and set a payment due date that turns a row overdue on its own. Mark one Paid when it lands.
• Billable hours on a card with no client can't go on any invoice. When there are some, a No Client tab shows up on the Invoices tab listing those cards. Open one and give it a client.
• Copy raises the next one from an invoice you already sent, same client, lines and rate, with a new number and today's date. An invoice is archived rather than deleted, and unarchived the same way.
• Give a client an address once, with Add address next to their name in Settings → Clients or in the invoice itself, and it prints under their name on every invoice to them.
• Set your details, how you want to be paid, your logo, your currency and your default payment terms once in Settings → Invoices. Each invoice keeps its own copy, so changing them later never rewrites one you've already sent.
• Invoicing is part of Pro. If Pro ends, the invoices you have raised stay readable and downloadable; only new ones need Pro again.

Performance Review

• Your year, organized for a performance review. Find it under Recap, as Performance Review. The draft turns your data into plain-language bullets. Copy it, or download it as Word or PDF.
• Organize by quarter, client, project, tag, or billable. Three switches decide what the draft says: include hours, include the task count, and, when you have billed inside the period, include what was invoiced, which starts off.
• The tables underneath list the work finished inside the period, folded up until you press Show all. Click any row to jump to that card, or Exclude it to keep it out of the review.
• Copy gives you the bullets on their own. Word and PDF carry the task lists too, for every fold you have opened, so open the ones you want before you download.
• AI Polish sits in the draft's toolbar and rewrites it into something you could hand your manager. Once it has, the polished version takes over the page with its own Copy, Word and PDF, and Show the original draft brings the draft back. See below.

Résumé

• Under Recap, beside Performance Review, as Résumé Builder. Same tracked work, a different document: a review is first-person and about a period, a résumé is impersonal and about what you can do.
• Your Details collects the things your board can't know: your name, job title, employer, how long you have been in the role, where you are, how to reach you, your education and your earlier roles. Every field is optional. Generate Résumé writes the rest from everything you've finished. See below.
• Use This as My Base keeps the résumé on screen as the starting point for the next one, so each run builds on the last instead of starting over.
• Handy for internal work: exclude a card or a whole swimlane from the résumé and it stays in your review.
• There's no date range here. A résumé covers what you've done, not a quarter.

The AI features

All three are optional and only ever run when you press the button. AI Polish and Generate Résumé are part of Pro. Ask Panda is free with an account for questions about the app, and Pro for questions about your own work. What each one sends is set out in the Privacy Policy.

• AI Polish rewrites the review draft into something you could hand your manager. The draft is plain-language but mechanical; this smooths it out.
• Generate Résumé (Pro) is a different job: it takes everything you finished and writes a résumé, not a review. A review is first-person and about a period; a résumé is impersonal and about what you can do. It groups many tasks into a handful of real accomplishments rather than listing your year.
• A résumé needs things your board can't know, so it asks once for your name, job title, employer, dates, contact details and education. Every field is optional. They're saved to your account, so a résumé written on your phone matches one written on your laptop.
• Quicker still: Upload Your Current Résumé, at the top of the Résumé page, as a PDF, a Word file or plain text. Panda reads the text out of it to pick up the history it can't know, your earlier jobs, education and qualifications, and rewrites your current role from what you've actually tracked. The text is saved with your details, so it is there the next time you generate one.
• Nothing is ever lost to a regeneration: the History button keeps the last twenty of each. They're on your account and open on any device you use. Open any version to read it, download it, or restore it back onto the page. Restoring is free and never spends a generation.
• Client names are left out by default. A recognisable client is powerful on a résumé, but naming your employer's clients can breach a confidentiality clause. Tick the box in Your details if you're sure it's fine, and your work is described by scale instead ("eight clients") if you're not.
• Both produce Word and PDF alongside Copy.

Read it before you send it. AI writes a convincing first draft and can still get things wrong, or word something more strongly than you would. That matters most on a résumé, which gets fact-checked in an interview. Check the names, the numbers, and anything that sounds like a claim you didn't make.

Settings

• Appearance: language (English / Español / हिन्दी), light / dark / system theme, card style (sticky, flat, or clean), font, and text size. These stay on the device you set them on; your boards are what follows you. The language you pick is also the one Panda writes your review and résumé in.
• Calendar: set your work hours (the Day and Week grids open to this range), and pick a calendar card style that matches the board or has its own look. Once you've connected Google Calendar, this is also where you choose which swimlane new meetings land in, whether to skip placeholders, and where you stop syncing.
• Boards, columns & swimlanes: create and reorder them, set which columns track time and which mark work done, and set a limit on how many cards a column should hold. Manage your Clients / Projects / Tags / Skills lists here too.
• Priorities: rename the four levels and change their colours, or put them back to the originals.
• Archived tasks: review anything you've archived and restore it if you want it back. Archived cards and swimlanes are hidden from the board but still count in Reports and your Performance Review.
• Bulk add tasks: add a batch of tasks to the active board at once. Download a template, or pick a spreadsheet from another tool and match up the columns. Calendar files (.ics / .csv) work here too, same as the Calendar tab.
• Toggl and Clockify (Pro, beta): paste the key from your tracker and timers you start there arrive here as cards. Import Past Work brings in what you tracked before you connected: pick how far back, which swimlane and column, and check the cards before they land. Entries with the same name, client and project share a card. It runs once, or pick Don't import; either way, after that only new time comes in, so edits you make here stay put.
• Invoices (Pro): your details, how you want to be paid, your logo, your currency and your default payment terms.
• API access (Pro): create a key to drive your board from a script, and revoke it whenever you like. The key is shown once.
• Data & backups: download a full .json backup or a spreadsheet-friendly .csv. Import & merge adds a backup on top of what you have. Restore takes a .json or a spreadsheet: a full backup replaces everything, and a single-board file is added as another board. Deleting a board or resetting downloads a backup first. Reset also clears the reviews and résumés in History, and that backup keeps a copy of them.
• About: links to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Heads up: your boards sync to your account, so they're on every device you sign in on. Download a backup from Settings → Data & backups now and then so you never lose anything.

What Kanban is

Kanban started on Toyota's factory floor and moved into office work in the 2000s. The idea is simple: put every piece of work on a card, put the cards on a board, and move them left to right as they progress. Nothing stays hidden in your head or your inbox.

Four ideas carry most of the value:

• See the work. A board shows what you have actually committed to. A list of intentions in your head does not.
• Limit what's in progress. The one people skip, and the one that matters. Set one for any column in Settings, under Columns, and the count above that column turns red once you pass it. Panda will not stop you; finishing something before starting something else is yours to do.
• Watch the flow, not the effort. The useful question is how long work takes to finish, not how busy you felt. Reports shows that as cycle time, counted from the day a card was made to the day it was done.
• Say what Done means. A card in Done should need nothing further from you. If it does, it isn't done, and your Performance Review will overstate your year.

Panda's Recap adds time tracking on top, so the board records how long work took as well as that it happened. A year of both is what your Performance Review gets written from.